Taylor Corporation Subsidiaries Create Digital Center of Excellence with Larger Footprint and Exciting New Offering

Bloomington, MN — A leading supplier of personalized printing solutions and a subsidiary of Taylor Corporation, Litho Tech proudly announces the creation of a Digital Center of Excellence (DCE) in the Twin Cities. The DCE will become the hub of digital print production for Litho Tech customers, starting May 7, 2012.

Equipment assets in the new center will include two (2) color digital machines, an iGen3 and an HP Indigo 5500, and six (6) black-and-white digital machines—all DocuTech 6180s with booklet makers.  Bindery capabilities will include saddle stitching, wire-o, coil, perfect binding, and 3-ring binders.

Other equipment/services will include full lettershop services, kit packing, and fulfillment.

Customers of Litho Tech will enjoy additional capabilities offered through the DCE, including more robust programming capabilities for direct mail and one-to-one direct marketing jobs, and a complete XMPie® suite of services including variable print calendars and cards.

In addition to the benefits of enhanced delivery times and more diverse capabilities, an important feature of the DCE is the Secured Printing and Mailing area equipped with secure FTP, dedicated transmission lines. This limited-access secure production area is controlled with key cards and security cameras.  These measures ensure the integrity of confidential information during the production of products such as examinations and mailings with private health information (PHI).

Bill Cahill, President of Litho Tech, believes that customers will benefit from the DCE in many different ways.  “In planning the Digital Center of Excellence,” said Cahill, “we have built in plenty of redundancy in our capabilities. This redundancy not only enhances our ability to deliver on time, it allows us to optimize equipment utilization for greater efficiency and more competitive pricing. Although our new, larger footprint is perfect for larger jobs, it will help us turn every job faster as well as efficiently. Combining highly skilled production and customer service teams and equipment into one location means we can expand our shifts to 24 hours per day and enhance our capabilities. The DCE will give us a much stronger offering for our customers, who can still rely on all of the great products and services they’re used to receiving from us, only more so, faster and even better.”

Litho Tech has been delivering personalized printing solutions since 1960. Their growth has been a result of high quality production and exemplary service. Today, in addition to this exciting new DCE offering, they have a wide variety of conventional offset press equipment operating under G7 processes. They offer state-of-the-art prepress services and a wide variety of bindery capabilities. 

Taylor Corporation is one of the nation’s largest print providers with scores of locations across the U.S. as well as businesses in Canada, Mexico and Europe.

XMPie® is a registered trademark of XMPie, a Xerox Company.

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October 27th, 2010 -

CMYK is the king of color in the printing world. Four-color printing, (a.k.a. full-color printing) uses the CMYK process, which consists of four ink shades: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (sometimes called Key). 48HourPrint.com uses CMYK colors to create vivid color reproductions that will make your marketing pieces pop! Enjoy these interesting facts about four-color printing.

• CMYK gets layered

CMYK inks are semi-transparent, so instead of mixing these colors, they are layered together in the printing process. The outcome is bright, accurate, solid shades.

• Benefits of basic black

Any color, when lowered to the end of the spectrum, can create black, but this wastes ink. Including black in CMYK saves money and ink. Separating black from cyan, magenta and yellow in four-color printing optimizes the remaining colors and produces better results.

• C M Y K=Subtraction

Four-color printing is often called a “subtractive” model because adding colored inks to white paper “subtracts” brightness from the paper.

• Spot-on colors

To create thousands of colors, four-color printing uses half-toning. Printing tiny dots of the four colors in varying amounts in a small pattern tricks the eye into seeing a particular color. Without half-toning, four-color printing would produce only six solid shades: cyan, magenta, yellow, green, purple and red.

• Avoid “shifty” colors

A computer monitor displays RGB (red, green and blue) colors, whereas printing presses use the CMYK process. To avoid a color shift in printing, design your file in CMYK or convert your RGB file to CMYK before submitting it.

QUESTION:?When was desktop publishing invented?

Several events of the mid-1980s including the development of Aldus PageMaker (now Adobe PageMaker) ushered in the era of desktop publishing.

ANSWER:?It was primarily the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter, a PostScript desktop printer, and PageMaker for the Mac that kicked off the desktop publishing revolution. Aldus Corporation founder Paul Brainerd, is generally credited for coining the phrase, "desktop publishing." 1985 was a very good year.

1. 1984 - The Apple Macintosh debuts.
2. 1984 - Hewlett-Packard introduces the LaserJet, the first desktop laser printer.
3. 1985 - Adobe introduces PostScript, the industry standard Page Description Language (PDL) for professional typesetting.
4. 1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application.
5. 1985 - Apple produces the LaserWriter, the first desktop laser printer to contain PostScript.
6. 1987 - PageMaker for the Windows platform is introduced.
7. 1990 - Microsoft ships Windows 3.0.

Fast forward to 2003 and beyond. You can still buy Hewlett-Packard LaserJets and Apple LaserWriters but there are hundreds of other printers and printer manufacturers to choose from as well. PostScript is at level 3 while PageMaker is at version 7 but is now marketed to the business sector.

In the intervening years since PageMaker's introduction and purchase by Adobe, Quark, Inc.'s QuarkXPress took over as the sweetheart of desktop publishing applications. But today Adobe's InDesign is firmly planted in the professional sector and wooing over many converts on both the PC and Mac platforms.

While Macintosh is still considered by some to be the platform of choice for professional desktop publishing, dozens of "consumer and small business desktop publishing" packages hit the shelves in the 1990s, catering to the growing legions of PC/Windows users. Most notable among these low-cost Windows desktop publishing options, Microsoft Publisher and Serif PagePlus continue to add features that make them more and more viable as contenders to the traditional "professional apps."

Desktop Publishing in the 21st Century?has seen a change in the way we define desktop publishing including who does desktop publishing and the software used, even if many of the original players remain.