Print with us
Inks
We stock twelve inks: Maroon, Bright Red, Orange, Yellow, Bright Olive Green, Kelly Green, Mint, Teal, Blue, Purple, Fluorescent Pink, and Black. Riso inks don’t conform to any industry-standard matching system, but we’ve indicated similar-ish hex codes and Pantone numbers for your reference. These inks are a little transparent, so they can overprint in interesting ways. They also look great in halftones. You can download our swatches for use in Adobe software.
Pricing
Pricing is based on a fixed setup (based on how many inks are used) plus a per-print cost for paper and ink. Every project is a little different, so we’d be glad to give you a custom quote! Email orders@clatterpress.com.
Sheet size
We do all our printing on 11″ × 17″ sheets. If you’re making something smaller than that, you can divide up the sheet to maximize value!
Printable area
Plan on a non-printing area of 1/8″ on the sides and bottom of your sheet and 1/4″ on the top. If you want your art to extend to the paper’s edges, you’ll need to add bleed and crop marks, and the total printed area will need to stay within the printable area of the sheet.
Imperfections
Riso printing is unpredictable, so you should expect quirks such as slightly uneven solid areas, roller marks, and misregistration (inks that aren’t perfectly lined up). You can minimize sloppiness by avoiding large areas of heavy ink coverage—especially in the top few inches of the page, where rollers will handle the paper.
Halftones
You don’t need to include halftones in your work—we will do that on the machine itself when we print your work. We will choose the best screening method based on our expertise. If you have a particular look in mind, just let us know and we’d be delighted to talk about it.
“Full-color” printing
There are no standard CMYK riso printing inks, but we can create a funky, quasi-CMYK print using our own specialized color separation techniques to take best advantage of our inks. Just send us your full-color art as-is and we’ll produce the necessary separations from it.
Submitting your art
When you’re ready to print, you’ll need to send us one 600-dpi grayscale PDF, TIFF, or JPG for each ink in your project. Think of it this way: in the file you send, black represents 100% ink coverage and white 0%. Please remember to include a low-resolution full-color proof so we know how you expect the final colored prints to look.
Finishing
We can trim and saddle-staple your projects in house, and we work with local partners for other, more complex types of binding. We’d love to help you create whatever you dream up!