Printing design requires understanding what letterpress printing is

Printing design requires understanding what letterpress printing is

Relief printing is similar to seals and woodcut prints, and is a direct pressure printing method.

The graphics and text on its printing plate are all inverted, with the graphic and text parts higher than the blank area. During printing, the graphic and text parts are coated with ink, and then the paper is overlaid and pressurized, and the ink is transferred from the printing plate to the paper surface. In current relief printing, the ink supply device of the printing machine first evenly distributes ink on the ink rollers, and then transfers the ink to the printing plate through the ink rollers. As the graphic and textual parts on the relief plate are much higher than the non graphic and textual parts on the printing plate, the ink on the ink rollers can only be transferred to the graphic and textual parts of the printing plate, while the non graphic and textual parts have no ink. The paper feeding device of the printing machine transports the paper to the printing components of the printing machine. Under the pressure of the embossing device, the ink in the graphic and textual parts of the printing plate is transferred to the substrate, thereby obtaining a printed product with clear imprint of the text.

It is relatively easy to identify relief printed materials. Generally, if there are slight imprints, raised lines, or neat edges of the dots on the back of the paper, and if the ink appears lighter in the center, it can be considered a relief print. The reason is that the raised edge of the imprint is subjected to heavy pressure, resulting in slight protrusion of the imprint. Printing plate materials mainly include woodblock, movable type plate, copperplate, lead plate, thin aluminum plate, electroplated lead plate, highly durable plastic copy plate, photosensitive resin plate, rubber plate, flexible plate, etc. Convex printing is particularly suitable for printing products with small areas and few color layers. For example, some books, receipts, envelopes, business cards, packaging bags, cards, labels, etc. are still using letterpress printing. For special processing such as hot stamping, silver stamping, embossing, etc., relief printing is generally used. However, letterpress printing has some drawbacks: the plate making process is complex and not suitable for large-area, multi-color printing; The plate making cycle is long and the printing speed is relatively slow; When making corroded copper zinc plates and casting lead type, it causes too much environmental pollution. Therefore, large-scale ordinary production still relies on offset printing.