Notes · 4 August 2020
Print at home, stop apologising for it
Most design work that gets printed at home would be worse if it had been sent to a professional printer.
Most design work that gets printed at home would be worse if it had been sent to a professional printer. Designers keep apologising for home-printed work, as if a domestic ink-jet were a compromise. It is not. It is a different medium with different strengths.
The strengths.
Speed. A piece of work printed on a home printer takes minutes. A piece of work sent to a professional printer takes days, by the time the file has been prepared, the proof has been agreed, the run has been scheduled, and the box has been delivered. For most studio work that is going to a single client or to a small group of internal stakeholders, the difference matters.
Iteration. The cost of printing a second version of a piece of work, on a home printer, is approximately the cost of an A4 sheet and a few millilitres of ink. The cost of doing the same thing through a professional printer is the entire run again. Home printing lets the work iterate in physical space, which is, on most projects, where the most useful design feedback happens.
Honesty. A home-printed piece of work looks like it was printed at home. It does not pretend to be the final artefact. The client understands what they are looking at. They are looking at a draft. The professional-printed version, on the other hand, looks like it has been finished, even when it has not. Clients who only ever see the professional-printed proof tend to mistake it for the final.
The weaknesses, which are real.
A home printer cannot match Pantone. A home printer cannot do special inks, foils, embossing, or letterpress. A home printer cannot match the paper stock the final piece will ship on. None of these matter at the iteration stage. All of them matter at the final stage. The final piece should still go to a professional printer. The drafts should not.
A few practical things that have made home printing worth taking seriously.
A decent A4 colour laser printer, ideally a Brother HL-L3270CDW or its equivalent in the year you are reading this. About the price of a single small print run. Pays for itself in months. Does not need its consumables replaced as often as ink-jets.
A small stack of decent paper. Mohawk Superfine in eggshell, or G.F Smith’s Colorplan in a few neutrals, in A4. Costs a few pounds per pack. Makes the home-printed proof look like a proper piece of work, even though it is being printed on a domestic printer.
The discipline of printing at the size the work will be used at. A logo printed at A4 size is not the same artefact as the logo printed at the size of a business card. The home printer lets you print at the right size, fold, hold, look at the work in your hand. This is the single design exercise most studios skip and most senior designers swear by.
The companion post on ordering small batches of paper covers the next step up, for proofs that need a more considered stock than a domestic printer can handle.
The professional-printer-only studios are running the design feedback loop at the wrong tempo. The work is, predictably, slightly worse. Print at home. Stop apologising.