The Print Shop
Calverts is a printer and design studio based in London. We’re also a workers’ co-operative.
To celebrate Calverts’ 40th year, we invited illustrator Alice Pattullo and publishers Design For Today to work with us on a creative print collaboration.
The Print Shop follows the journey of an idea as it transforms into a finished product. It’s a tour through illustration, art direction, design, file set up and reprographics with tips along the way.
Digital and large format print
Digital printing replaces metal plates and oil-based litho inks with laser-written electrostatically charged drums. Our digital presses use food safe inks.
The image can change with every revolution of the printing units, which means we can offer cost effective solutions for small runs of collated books and cards which would be too expensive to print litho. Our state-of-the-art KM C6100 digital press prints in mono or CMYK colour.
Find out more about digital print and see examples of our work.
Offset lithograph print
Calverts bought its first offset lithography Heidelberg press in 1977. ‘Offset’ means that the printed image is first transferred from a plate to a rubber ‘blanket’, and then on to paper, under pressure.
Litho guarantees faithful reproduction in thousands of colours, including fluorescents and metallics, on a huge range of printing substrates up to 600gsm.
Find out more about offset litho print and see some examples of our work.
Pantone colour
The Pantone colour matching system allows designers and printers to match specific colours regardless of the equipment used to produce the colour.
Most of the world’s printed material is produced using the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key/black) colour process, but most of the Pantone system’s 1,114 spot colours cannot be simulated with CMYK, and instead rely on 13 base pigments (14 including black) which are mixed in specified amounts.
The Pantone system also allows for many special colours to be produced, such as metallic and fluorescent colours.
Risograph print
Risograph
A Risograph is a stencil duplicator, and Riso printing uses soy-based ink. In a similar way to screen printing, a print image is burned onto a master sheet, which is then wrapped round a print drum.
Ink is pushed through this stencil onto the paper. The process is repeated for each colour. Riso inks are semi transparent, which means colours can be overlaid to produce even more variation.
Find out more about riso print and see some examples of our work.
Special finishes and binding
You can buy a copy of The Print Shop directly from Design For Today’s online shop.
Find more of Alice Pattullo’s illustration work on her website.
To see some examples of what we can do with print take a look at our print showcase.
If you have an idea for a print project we’d love to talk about it. Email info@calverts.coop or give us a call on 020 7739 1474.
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