Tag Archive - printing

A lesson in checking the price before going to print

August 26, 2010 in for Churches

I needed to print 5, A1 posters for church’s upcoming I Heart Kirribilli art exhibition and prize. I went to my usual provider – Officeworks, who print A1 posters for $19 – bargain! Unfortunately, they were busy, and couldn’t fit me in.

Officeworks suggested I go to Snap Printing – their printer was broken. They suggested I visit another printer up the road and good news – their printer wasn’t broken and they could fit me in. As we were arranging a time to pick up the posters, I thought I better check the price.

Total: $456! Ouch.

I thought the prices would be more expensive, I didn’t think they’d be 4.5 times the price!

I’ve emailed the files to another Officeworks store, and saved myself $361. When it’s a service that lots of businesses can provide for little to no difference in quality, it pays to ask around, and get a good price.

Normally I go to my usual provider, but today I was in a hurry, and they couldn’t turn the job around in time. However, $456 was a high price to pay for a quick turnaround!

Here are some suggestions for churches on getting larger print jobs done at a good price.

Not another brochure

July 12, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

When I’m considering offline (i.e. non-internet) ways of promoting activities at church, my default position is to consider postcards (usually A6), as well as posters (usually A1 and A3).

It’s encouraging to see how other churches are exploring different print formats for their communication. Here’s one from Kirk Place:

Have you got any examples from your church’s promotion?

Where does your church get its printing done?

June 2, 2010 in for Churches

My church does a lot of printing. We do a lot of printing because we value communication – clear, effective and engaging communication – and while websites and social media can help with this, often there’s no substitute for good old-fashioned offset (or digital) printing.

We print:

  • promotional postcards (see below),
  • response slips,
  • sermon notepads,
  • weekly newsletter templates,
  • business cards, and
  • A1 posters -

to name but a few!

We have a good quality Canon multi-function, but this has limited potential.

For the past 12 months we’ve been using Morningside Printers (they’re based in Victoria and my church is in Sydney, but delivery is free Australia-wide). We’ve been very happy with them – good service, good print quality, and the products are always delivered on time. This is especially good because we’ve given them some tight deadlines to work towards!

Other printers that have been recommended to me recently is 4colourprint, and inhouse.org.

Where does your church gets its printing done? Would you recommend your printer to others, or are you on the look-out for a replacement?

(Feature image credit: Biewoef)

Free tools to quickly and easily create booklets

January 18, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches

I’m getting married next week, and I’m putting together an order of service. I’ve created it in Pages (I haven’t installed Word on my new MacBook Pro) and I have the order in 6 A4 pages, laid out in portrait. However, I want to print it as a booklet (where the pages are printed on landscape, and folded in half). Perhaps you’ve had the same need with other printed materials – I know I have in the past! If you use Microsoft Word, this is a relatively painless process. I couldn’t work out how to do this without Word. Until tonight.

Thanks to Check 1-2, I discovered CreateBooklet. It adds an option to ‘Create booklet’ when you print a file on your Mac. It’s a little tricky to explain, so I’ll leave that to the guys at Check 1-2. Thankfully, the developer has also released an update for Snow Leopard. And, it’s free. I’ve got a lot of respect and thanks for people who develop free, quality apps. Thanks Christoph.

If you’re not using a Mac, an online application that does the same thing is Booklet Creator. Here are some instructions about how to use BookletCreator, including explaining how A4 PDFs are turned into A5 booklets.

My guess is, most people are still using Microsoft Office. However, if you’re not using Word, or you have a PDF that you want to turn into a booklet, you might find these tools to be quite useful.