The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

When we quote lead times for promotional items these are always from the approved artwork stage of the ordering process. If any stage can cause a delay in delivery, this is it and to help improve our customer service we introduced an ‘in-house’ Design Studio at Redbows last year. This has helped our customers tremendously and we get rave reviews from them post sale - see the comments from our customer satisfaction surveys.

So, what is the actual problem? Well we have access to millions of pounds worth of printing equipment for the various processes and products but without suitable artwork they simply do not run. Delays typically occur at the artwork stage for various reasons: (1) no artwork exists and our design team has to generate it from scratch, (2) there are several people/clients involved in the artwork sign off stage, (3) we need to turn the artwork into a suitable vector file, and finally (4) where numerous amendments are made to the artwork resulting in several approval forms being generated.

Of them all (3) is the easiest for us to solve rapidly and (1) typically takes a couple of hours in design time. (2) however is another matter, and for this all we can offer is a professional design service that responds to your inputs, and (4) well as you can imagine this can be a nightmare, and costly.

So, how can you get your gifts quickly ? Let us help you get your artwork right first time! 

This is a topic that does sometimes cause quite a bit of confusion! How on earth can you have an image on a promotional item that appears to be one colour, but is actually printed using a four colour process? Surely that’s madness???

Unfortunately, this is very common. In this post I will try to explain why:

Spot Colours  - a ’spot colour’ is a completely flat colour. Usually, a design consists of no more than four spot colours (anything over this becomes impractical and expensive to print) and more often than not, only one or two.  When a design uses four colours it is sometimes referred to as a ‘four colour’ design. If your design uses spot colours, each will usually have a Pantone reference (see my post on Pantone references here).

Tints and Shading - if your design has tints and shading in it, the likelihood is that these will require a full colour print. Now this is where the confusion comes in - a full colour print (used to print photographic images and other images or text that has tints and shading) is also referred to as a ‘process print’, a ‘full colour process print’ and - unfortunately - a ‘four colour process print’. This doesn’t necessarily mean your artwork has four colours in it - it is referring to the method by which the artwork will be printed. Images that have tints and shading in them (photographic images etc) are printed using a process that uses four colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black (K) - these four colours when used together can produce nearly any colour possible (very handy when printing a photographic image!) and provide what is known as a CMYK reference.

Here is an example of this effect. A single spot is used in Freddie 1. The second example (Freddie 2) is an example of a full colour (or ‘four colour process’ print). Notice how, strangely, they are both one colour.

Hopefully, this will help clear things up a little! If you’re still not sure as to whether your logo is a one colour or a full colour, here’s a little checklist to help work it out.

Checklist 

If your logo consists of:

A flat colour
One or more flat colours
Has no tints or shading in it…

…it’s a Spot Colour logo, and would be printed using perhaps a screen print process using Pantone references.

If your logo consists of:

Many colours, more than four
Colours containing tints and shading (otherwise known as ‘gradients’)

…it’s a Full colour logo, and would be printed using a four colour process procedure. Something worth noting - if your artwork has more than four spot colours, but all the colours are flat, it may just be the case that it is more economical to print it using a full colour process, as many spot colours tend to be quite costly!

And if you’re still in doubt, email your artwork to the Design Studio, where we’d be more than happy to let you know what’s what!

To Pantone or not to Pantone, that is the question…well, actually, we don’t give you the choice.

When your order your promotional items from Redbows, you will find that we ask you for your ‘Pantone references‘, or ‘PMS references’. Many of our clients are unsure as to what we are referring to when we ask for these, so I thought it was time for a little clarification!

When printing ’spot colours’ (ie. colours that are flat with no tints and shades in them), we ask for a PMS reference to ensure that the colour you are expecting will be the colour that gets delivered! Spot colours are collated in a ‘Swatch Library’, which can be found in your illustration application. The most popular and widely used of these is the ‘Pantone’ swatch library. This is a collection of pre-set colours that any Pantone-registered printer will be able to mix up, and the end result will be exactly the same wherever it is printed, and whom it is printed by. PMS references are usually more common with larger corporate companies who need to maintain a corporate image throughout everything that they produce, from staff uniforms to letterheads to brochures etc.

Whether big or small, we always ask our clients for a PMS reference when processing an order (except when printing in full colour process). This is to ensure that everyone is fully aware of the print that will be produced, and there are no big surprises when you open your delivery to find that your supposedly red print is actually…lime green (roughly the colour your face would turn if this were to happen).

I find the Pantone website a great source for colour management, and if you were to ask for us to choose a PMS reference on your behalf we can send you a link to the colour that we have chosen for you to view with your visual sample. If you would like to learn more about colour management, please visit www.pantone.com.

The Design Studio

What is our advice on what to put in a promotional gift’s imprint area ? Keep it simple. The basics often suffice and we recommend, logo, web address, phone number and marketing message. It all depends on how big the print area actually is and the number of them. For example, pens have print areas on the barrel and clips. Why is less more ? Well when you have a small imprint area, you may only be able to get all the information in using a very small font. Here the problems of readability and ink flow arise.  Think about your clients and their age range (for this read ability to view without glasses). Make what you print as big as possible, so that anyone can read it. Make the font too small and the ‘ink’ can bleed into the non-print areas. If in doubt you can always ask our Design Studio for a virtual visual and even order a pre-production sample.

There are several areas that a gift supplier like Redbows can play a major part in when it comes to the environment: printed materials, environmentally-friendly gifts and supplying electronic products that meet the WEEE and RoHS guidelines.

When we first got started in the gifts game we would receive literally tens of printed catalogues. Each cost a fortune to produce and post. Today, we still use catalogues but to a lesser degree thanks to electronic communications. The internet provides us with the opportunity to ‘present’ gifts through our websites, with Adobe PDF documents for download. We still have a small printed catalogue but it will only show a small selection of the gifts available rather than the entire product ranges. I am sure that over the next year, as we develop our ecommerce websites and documentation further, paper catalogues will be dropped from our marketing mix.

Redbows currently supplies a limited selection of environmentally-friendly products. A key factor in this is availability - there is just not a great selection available - yet! This will improve and manufacturers will develop their processes to produce an even wider variety. Currently mugs and pens are firm favourites as they can easily be made from recycled plastics. I am not convinced about the coasters made from recycled car tyres though…

Finally for electronic goods, the latest WEEE and RoHS directives apply. These directives apply to electrical and electronics items like USB flashdrives. RoHS is concerned with the materials used in manufacturing like lead-free solder and the processes involved, where as WEEE is concerned with end-of-life disposal of an item. A classic example is a battery - look for the crossed-out wheelie bin. This means that this product should not be simply thrown away at end-of-life but taken to a recycling centre.

So how environmentally friendly can the gifts industry get ? Well we obviously have a long way to go before today’s promotional pens can become part of tomorrow’s coffee mugs!

One of the most common problems that we encounter when processing an order for promotional gifts is the file type that our clients supply their artwork in. Many of our clients haven’t even heard of a Vector file, and to be honest, many of them don’t want to know what one is either! But those of you who have a burning desire to understand the difference between a Vector and a Raster file…grab a cuppa, a nice digestive, and read on…

All printers of promotional gifts require artwork in an Illustrator EPS Vector file (or Vector file from a similar industry-standard illustration application). The reason for this is that a Vector file is the only file type that contains all of the necessary information to guarantee a perfectly printed product. I like to think of a Vector image as one that has been made up using a join-the-dot system - it consists of a series of dots, with lines that join these dots together. The beauty of a Vector image is that it can be enlarged or decreased in size without any loss of detail whatsoever - so if you’re buying branded folding city bikes (and yes, we can do these), beach balls or yoyos, you know your logo will stay perfectly clear and beautifully proportioned.

In contrast, we have the Raster file (and no, it doesn’t feature dreadlocks or Bob Marley lookalikes). These types of files are made up of pixels, rather than paths (the name given to those lines in my join-the-dot analogy above), meaning that when scaled to a certain size loss of detail may occur, and edges may appear blurred. We have all experienced taking photos on a digital camera - blow the image right up and all you see is a series of coloured squares. This is pixellation, and doesn’t make for a very good print job!

To demonstrate the above quick overview of the necessity of a Vector file, I have produced a quick illustration (click on the image to view a larger file - pdf):

Hopefully this quick overview of the difference between a Vector and a Raster image has helped clear the mists of confusion as to why we so desperately need a Vector file (and to think you all thought we were just being fussy!).

You can find more notes like this from the Redbows Design Studio on our corporate website.

Well no but the prices are. We are often asked why we change our flashdrive and MP3 player prices so often. The answer is that two variables govern the pricing of memory-based products: the US$ exchange rate and memory chip availability. For example, at the moment there is a shortage of 256Mb chips and this is having a knock on effect on other sizes that use combinations of these.

So issuing price lists for these items can be a nightmare. We tend to take a ’swings and roundabouts’ approach to minor fluctuations but occasionally a client may see a much larger change. For this reason we work on a short validity on usb flashdrive prices and quotes, and prices can literally vary within 48 hours. The best thing we can advise clients is to use the prices as a budgetary guide if they are not ready to order then and there, and to always check for the latest prices. Sometimes, even in this mad world they fall further than a previous week’s rise.

We like tools that help us get the job done. One of the best we have found for locating exhibitions is available on expoab.com - the website for the exhibition and events industry. They have a page set up to help you locate any type of exhibition anywhere in the world - the data is collated from a massive database.

Off course exhibitions and events are great platforms for the use of promotional gifts and we have written a special guide on what we believe exhibitors need to consider when planning such events - click here for our guide on Tradeshow Giveaways.

Those of you who were hoping that this post was to announce the addition of burgers and other fast food delicacies to our promotional gift range will be severely disappointed!

Introducing the latest additions to the Redbows family - some shiny, sleek Apple Mac G5s - Intel Dual Core Duo - (don’t you just love the smell of a new computer - perhaps that’s a new idea for those car air freshener fragrances?). With the recent growth in design projects Redbows has been involved in, we felt it was time to join the Mac universe. Although our PCs are more than capable of doing the job, the Macs are an asset to our Design Studio, with the added benefit of improved file compatibility with our clients who send us files created on a Mac. Not only that, but we have now upgraded our facilities to the Adobe Creative Suite CS3, meaning our resources are now better than ever (and, during the much quieter periods, much more advanced doodling).

So, what do these extra additions to the Design Studio mean for our clients? Well, primarily it means that not only do we have one of the best ranges of promotional gifts in the UK, we also have one of the best complete design solutions to go with it…

Many of our clients don’t have their logo in an Illustrator EPS Vector file (I think I’ll save the explanation of why this is necessary for another post…), meaning that we often are required to convert the logo from the dreaded jPeg. With the addition of the extra technology at our disposal, this process is now much quicker, with most logo conversions taking place on the day that an order is placed.

In addition to that, we are now able to offer a more integrated and in-depth design service, from offering detailed advice and suggestions as to how products could be printed to a full graphic design service (logo design, optimised marketing etc). Our new facilities mean that our clients can get all they need for their next promotion in one place - a necessity for those who need to get a job done, and fast.

Whilst we have always offered Visual Samples to our clients, the expansion of the Design Studio means that these can now be offered within the hour, completely free of charge (except the much busier periods, however they can usually be provided within 24 hours). All you need to do to take advantage of this service is provide the name of the product you are looking at purchasing, along with a file containing the logo or artwork in question (preferably an Illustrator EPS Vector file). That’s it! You can email those to design@redbows.co.uk, then one of the team will email you back with your Visual Sample. This is an extremely useful service if you really are stuck and can’t visualise how the product will look. For examples of some recent Virtual Visuals - click here.

So as you can see, we’ve been busy at the Redbows Design Studio! We hope you agree that our creative services have never been better, and we hope that if you contact the Design Studio you enjoy working with us as much as we will enjoy working on your project!

When choosing promotional items we sometimes forget how the seasons can play a big influence. We have just added these delicious promotional sweets to our range of products. They will be ideal for summer corporate events and hospitality. 

These gourmet chocolates contain real fruit pieces, encased in rich chocolate and packed into pocked sized pillow packs. Weighing 50g these promotional items are conveniently sized and the packaging can have an imprint (your logo and message) of up to four colours. Flavours include blueberry, strawberries, raspberries and even real coffee - available in white or dark chocolate - yummy!