Sales, Prepress, Printing, Binding, Finishing

Over the past 20 years, Western offset production has been increasingly exported to Eastern Europe. Estonian printer Printon AS was established in 2000, ten years after independence from the Soviet Union. Similar to other printers in the Baltic region including Lithuania and Latvia, Printon has attracted international clients through their quality of production and competitive pricing and has become the largest sheet-printing house in Estonia.

However, with the rise of digital technology, the global printing industry has been disappearing quickly. To survive, companies have often streamlined operations and merged with competition to form large-scale printing supply chains, endangering the existence of smaller offset printers. The global offset printing industry has shifted to specialize in mass scale production of money, financial certificates, educational publications, trade advertising material and paper products.

Just recently, Printon’s owner, Infortar, bought its competitor, Tallinn Book Printers. Further, the escalating threat of war spilling over from Ukraine has slowed economic growth in the Baltic states. Due to both economic and political instability, industry in the Baltic region faces decline. In this workshop, we will be exploring the subject of offset production within the context of the Baltic region and its uncertain future.

For this workshop, each student will conceive and design an 8-page 4/4 CMYK signature to be offset-printed and bound into a saddlestich publication at Printon. The topic of your signature should be related to Printon. Consider your chapter as an offset printing test and try to use the possibilities and limits of CMYk offset printing to translate your idea. Printon has graciously allowed us to use their premises during the workshop and is supplying us with steeply discounted leftover paper stock. Thus, all content for the publication should be generated on the premises of the factory. When considering your topic, keep in mind the different stages of production in offset printing including sales, prepress, printing, binding and finishing.

Finally, there will be an additional chapter accompanying the class publication that will function as a glossary of offset production. Each student will be responsible of a subsection of the glossary, as translated through your approach to the project.