I am blown away by the tornado of printing supremacy that is Minuteman!  

Mike Tindall. Grace Church

Very pleased with the new 'calling cards'.  

Veronica. High Peak Flowers, Disley

Very fast turnaround when no one else could help.  

Mat

Always a wonderful service - friendly family run always with a smile ;)  

Maria Kildunne. Healthwatch, Stockport

...pleasure dealing with Minuteman. Quick, excellent price & quality.  

Mark Rawsthorne

Top quality.  

Martin Bury

Some of Minuteman Press Stockport's Customers

Healthwatch

Promotional Products

SpecSavers

  Training & Forms  

Home Instead

   Business Cards   

Richer Sounds

Manuals, Letterheads

Sky Training

 Manuals & Displays 

Castrads

Vouchers & Brochures

Minuteman Press Stockport Design and Print

Minuteman Press, Stockport, we design print and promote you...

Our in house designers are available for a professional design.

There are times when I think print shops are two a dozen, until I get a phone call and the caller says they can't find a print shop. One customer travelled all the way from Macclesfield recently; a bit odd because I know for certain there is another Minuteman Press shop in Macclesfield!
Despite the huge efforts of the print industry to mechanise and computerise it's still a very person orientated industry. At the front end there is a sales team with lots of technical support required to overcome all the numerous technical issues. With an abundance of consumer orientated online printers one might get the impression the whole process is easy and just a matter of drafting an idea out in Word. Online consumer orientated printers try to overcome the technicalities by having lots of templated to choose from.
It's a massive investment for the on-line printers and suffering from the issue of designs becoming quickly becoming dated; design styles change from year to year. What's cool one year quickly becomes passé the next. It's also difficult to imagine how the customers can work out what the difference is between a perfect bound brochure printed on 130gsm gloss coated and a 160gsm wire bound brochure printed on a 160gsm uncoated. Without lots of personal interaction with the printer. What happens next in the print also requires lots of personal interaction.
Print jobs go wrong. We had to reprint a job for a big printer recently. The big printers were in a hurry and we were able to deliver on time. The unhappy customer was draining resources of the big print company as they dealt with the issues the customer had raised. In my humble opinion the customer was at fault. They had submitted art work files on-line in the wrong page order. On-line print companies also suffer from the vagaries of courier deliveries. Damaged print and delays due to bad weather.
High street print shops are life savers. Need a job completed 'yesterday'? Our franchise had a strap-line 'for the printing job you need yesterday'. In the 21st century that might seem laughable. In the decades past, though, the print process was rather long winded, technical and obscure. A simple print job such as letterhead and business cards would take weeks. Firstly create the art work in primitive design software. Adobe certainly didn't exist with its chart topping Creative Suite of Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. Even computers would struggle with graphics. Print the design onto paper. Stick the sheets onto another sheet to make up the design. Maybe throw in Letraset, if you were really state of the art. Photo the design and create a photographic film. Use the photographic film to develop an aluminium plate. Add the plate to a lithographic press. Add the ink and water to the rollers. Waste a load of paper getting the image right. Print the job. Clean the machine and plate. Let the ink dry on the paper. Enter Minuteman Press with a commitment to get a move on.
Contemporary print systems try to automate the whole process. The newer systems do have some down sides (other than being bankrupting expensive). Everyones print job gets printed at the same time. The butcher, the baker and candle stick maker. Consequently colours can be unpredictable. The print process used to use one colour to create an image. Now most print mixes 4 colours to create the full rainbow. Again, getting a colour right will be difficult. One colour can still be specified but immediately the price of setting up the print job will rocket. Viable if you're a big corporation printing millions of sheets but expensive if you're a one person business. Most customers will just have to lump it and put up with colour variations.

Design and Print Help

May I suggest you don't get seduced into just start designing something on an App without thinking through the end result?

Often the end result won't work as you expected. If you don't have any expectations, no problem! But otherwise, a professional print result will require some design and print and marketing expertise. You can phone, email, text, call-in, WhatsApp, Minuteman Press Stockport and ask for help. A key thing is to start with the correct size page size. This can be tricky if you aren't familiar with the Apps workings or the App isn't designed with print in mind. Next, keep important items, like text, well away from the edge of the page (6mm away). Check (try Googling) bleed requirements. Top quality images are important and if you are ripping them using Google searches (as against taking your own photos) look for high resolution ones. Good quality free pictures are available on the internet that you are allowed to use. Work designed for the web will have different requirements to printed documents. Work designed for banners will have different requirements to brochures and flyers.