The Internet has opened up many customized services such as print on demand. Whether its one time printing of hard cover books like Blurb.com or short run business products like business cards, post cards and brochures, it opens the opportunity for small businesses and SOHO businesses to produce professional quality print materials in short runs. One service I recently tried is Overnightprints.com for printing some marketing materials for my Cutting Horse Photography and I thought I pass on some thoughts about using this service.

 

The service offers many products such as business cards, post cards, rack cards, bookmarks, brochures and many more. I decided to produce some rack cards and went to work on the project. Overnightprints has online creation applications to create your product using generic elements however, being a creative, I downloaded the Photoshop templates and went to work on my design.

Couple of things to note in the design process:

1.) The printing system uses CMYK colour space instead of RGB that inkjet printing uses. Colour issues is a very complex issue but basically, one has to be careful to make sure colours and images do not include colours out side the colour gamut of CMKY. As I was not overly critical about the 100% match of the colours, I simply made sure any imported photos and graphics were converted to CMKY prior to placement and allowed Photoshop to make the necessary adjustments.

2.) Pay carefull attention to Safe Areas and keep images or text well out of these areas so they don't get cut in the trimming process.

3.) When doing 2 sided documents, pay attention to the proper orientation of the front and back image to insure the printed material is printed properly. Nothing worse then having the back upside down in relation to the front.

Fortunately Overnightprints as a lot of information online to help in the design process.

After creating a JPG image and uploading, the ordering process was very simple and straight forward. Payment can be by credit card or Paypal. Not sure how the service worked and how good the results were, I only placed a small order of 100 2 sided 4x9 rack cards with UV coating.

Overnightprints is an US based company and  International shipping is only through UPS. The available options can be expensive though. I elected to use the ground option but it turned out costing me a lot more money then I anticipated to ship the small order I placed. The only disappointment in the whole experience with their service.

Order procurement was very quick. I placed the order on Sunday afternoon and by Monday I was provided with a tracking number. The shipment to Canada took about 3 days. The only negative about the whole experience is the userous rates charged by UPS. My print order was only 40$ USD (very reasonable) but my UPS Ground Shipping was $18.58 USD + and additional $37.03 customs brokerage fees and taxes. I paid more to ship the product then print the product! Though this is not Overnightprints problem, the service would be an absolute 100% in my mind if they offered US Postal Shipping as an option instead of only UPS.

So how were the cards? I was very impressed. The top card had a slight bit of damage, probably from the printing process but all other cards were great. The print was crisp and clear. Colour looked great. The card stock is excellent and free UV coating gives the cards a durable and professional look and feel.

Yes I will use the service again as there are one of the most ecomonical on demand printers online.

Knowing what I know now about UPS, I would try to only use the service when doing a larger order of multiple items in order to take better advantage of the shipping costs. I would not use the service for small order prints like my initial order unless it was an emergency. That being said, Overnightprints was fast and the workmanship was good. Shame about the shipping issues, hopefully something that will be improved but I do highly recommend the service.