Many significant tasks in a business such as maintaining flow of information intra-company and marketing the offerings of the company need printing service. Therefore it is helpful to know about the basic working of the frequently used printing process called offset printing. 

Offset printing is so well known among printing service companies and clients because for large quantities, it turns out to be cheaper than alternative methods. Hence for bulk orders any good printing company would advise you to go for offset printing.

 

Offset printing employs oil based offset printing ink, which does not blend with water. The offset printing gets its name from the fact that the designs are transferred in an indirect way from the plates to the paper by use of rubber blankets as the agents.

 

The process starts by preparing the designs. When offset printing started, the images had to be made by the use of film negatives and they were later transferred to aluminum plates. However, a modern printing company would now develop the plates directly by using an image setting system. This plate is then put on a cylinder in the proper configuration. Then the water and offset printing inks are dispersed on the image plates, in that order. While the ink gets fixed to the image, the water gets attached to that part of the plate where there is no image so that the ink does not spill beyond the image.

 

The image is then transferred from the plates to the rubber blanket rolled on another cylinder, so that it is inverted. The image is inverted to its correct side by transferring the image to sheets which have been cut in line with the need and are put on a different cylinder.

 

Printed sheets are stapled, pasted, or assembled in any other manner as required and the printing company delivers them after giving some finishing touches.