Do your marketing materials have Aqueous coating overload?

Must every printed item you touch have that “natural” feeling of your mother’s floor wax (which is essentially similar)? I’m one who likes to feel the paper, therefore I prefer to use varnish for the inside pages and for most commercial printing, but only if the budget allows.

Now let’s take a moment and travel back to the nostalgic era of spot varnish. Can you remember the smell? That golden age when time was available for each side of the press sheet to properly dry. The touch and feel of the paper was remarkable. The tactile feel of a matte vs. velvet printed surface. Anyone remember Quintessence Dull or Vintage? This was the age of spot gloss and spot dull varnish. Portraying gloss images against negative space. You could feel the unique properties of each paper and they had a heart. Oh the days of budgets.

REALITY!

Today it’s all about throughput. And AQ has provided a helpful solution. It’s inexpensive; it’s easy and allows our industry to meet those otherwise impossible deadlines. AQ allows printers to process jobs in mere minutes rather than days/hours; which can result in a huge cost savings for many projects.

But if we’re are going to cover up the sheet with AQ, why use anything other than Topkote? Applying AQ coating can turn any nice paper into “just another white sheet”. Perhaps this is one reason the paper industry has a hard time promoting #1 papers. Suddenly that premium #1 sheet feels very similar to Topkote after all that glorious coating is applied?

As a designer you know paper contributes warmth, feel and emotion. And specifying the right paper can help keep your printed piece looking relevant; isn’t that the point? Let’s consider some affordable options:


(for this discussion, I’m not including UV coating, heatset web or uncoated papers)

NOTE: IF you want high quality sheetfed printing on gloss, dull, or matte coated papers, some type of coating (varnish or AQ) is required to reduce scuffing or ink setoff. Especially in the moderate to heavy ink coverage areas.

Alternatives for short run projects are the most difficult. Today’s budgets leave little room for sheetwise printing (one set of plates for each side) FOR short run jobs. “Work and turn” rules the short run market and AQ coating allows customers the opportunity to print both sides quickly and economically. The customer receives the benefit of a single makeready (lower cost) and a fast-to-market product.

IDEAS:

• My number one enhancement to combat AQ overload is to add a strike-through dull varnish under the coating. This creates a chemical reaction and “dulls” down the area where the varnish is applied. More about this below.
• Add a PMS color. Satin and dull coatings tend to change the color of a PMS ink underneath, however the ink company can specially match the ink WITH the coating in-place. An ink draw down (ink proof) can verify the end result you’ll see on press.
• Match the desired coating effect to the paper. Gloss and satin coatings work well on gloss paper. Satin and dull coatings work well on dull/matte papers. If you want the coating to be almost invisible, select a dull coating on dull/matte papers. I like to see the paper and not the coating. Recent chemical formulas have greatly reduced the streaking effect from dull coatings. Dull coatings continue to streak and work poorly on gloss papers.
• Add a metallic ink. I prefer varnish to protect metallic inks but a reasonably good reproduction is still possible if you use a gloss AQ coating. Metallic inks lose their sheen on dull/matte papers when used with satin or dull coatings.
• Soft touch AQ. The feel is very similar to Touche or Plike papers; think velvety soft finish. It’s also environmentally friendly. See below for more information.
• Increase the basis weight of the stock. It will add heft to the job and feel more valuable. However keep your postage in mind; a little extra weight can get you in trouble with the accounting types.

Long run projects: Applying a spot varnish to each side is a relatively inexpensive upgrade from AQ and it doesn’t affect the turnaround. By the time the press is finished with one side, the other side is dry enough to back up. In my mind, a long enough run (+ 12 hours) is the first requirement. Sometimes special finishing (die scoring/cutting) necessitates the engineering of a sheetwise layout and you can utilize varnish without a big monetary penalty. Varnish needs enough drying time to avoid gas ghosting or fuming (Gas ghosting is a latent image burned into the ink due to the ink vapor release from the opposite side of the paper).

This brings me back to “strike through” dull varnish. Strike through runs just like a conventional varnish. However when the job dries, the gloss coating on top of the varnish dulls back creating a dull effect; the adjacent gloss coating remains glossy creating contrast. Strike-through dull varnish is available from several ink manufacturers but only ONE manufacturer has a product that truly stands out; it’s available for your next project. The strike-through dull varnish and the gloss AQ work together. This creates the maximum contrast between gloss and dull. It’s cost effective, different and really helps your budget minded projects standout.

Try the soft touch AQ for the right project. Health care, medical products, education, hospitality and food products are good markets for soft touch AQ. It’s applied as a dry pass over a previously coated paper. The cost of the soft touch AQ chemical is about 5 times that of conventional AQ and requires a 2nd pass and sometimes 3rd through the press. The feel is unique, it’s quick, less expensive than UV coating. It’s also less expensive than printing on Touche or Plike. Environmentally friendly too. Works well.