Printing, Paper and Presses: Our Class Field Trip to RR Donnelly

Get your message out! Social media and internet campaigns and promotions can only do so much. Printing is an integral part of Public Relations. Many different portions of a PR campaign involve the use of some printed material. To create these materials, many companies turn to large-scale professional printing houses like RR Donnelly.

As we have learned in our classes, Public Relations relies on many forms of printed materials, whether it be full information booklets, to small key tags. These kinds of printed materials can make or break a PR campaign depending on which audience you are addressing.

Two weeks ago our Public Relations class had the opportunity to visit RR Donnelly, Toronto.We were able to see the printing process firsthand, from pre-printing all the way to the finished product.

According to our tour guide Dean, RR Donnelly claims to be the largest printing company on the planet, and their goal is to serve all of the Fortune 500 companies.

A diagram of the process of offset lithography

Making an impression

The type of printing they do at RR Donnelly is offset lithography which relies on the principle that oil and water repel each other. They create large flexible plates that hold water using static electricity in certain areas. In the other areas, the oil based ink sticks to that surface and can make an impression on paper.

An image of a sheetfed press

Stop The Presses!

There are three types of presses at RR Donnelly: sheetfed, web press, and digital press.

The sheetfed press is the most commonly used press in the print shop. It takes individual sheets and runs them through the press, printing one colour at a time from different plates. The sheet fed presses can use many different colours and paper stocks. They can print sizes from

8 1/2x 11 up to 87x 54 and they judge based on the volume of the print job which sizes to use. These presses can also use special hybrid inks that have a UV formula in them to make the ink dry faster. RR Donnelly is the largest single sheet fed print shop in Canada.

A package with a colour bar. These bars show what colours were used to print the package.

Colour your World

Some print jobs only need the four basic CYMK colours: cyan (blue), yellow, magenta (pink) and black. Most colours can be created from this basic palette. However, if a customer requests a certain colour to be printed a specific way- usually corporate colours- they can request that ink be used as well in their printing job. RR Donnelly Toronto has a representative from Flint Group, their ink supplier, who works in their plant and matches specific colours. He also makes sure that they will print correctly on the paper stocks the client has requested. RR Donnelly has sheet-fed presses that print anywhere from six to twelve different colours for one print job!

A web press similar to the ones at RR Donnelly 

The Web Press

The largest presses at RR Donnelly are the web presses- they have two of these massive machines.These presses are fed with giant rolls of paper that weigh at least a ton each. They are called web presses because of the way that the continuous paper sheets are threaded through the press. These presses are only used for very large jobs, that don’t have much colour. The web presses RR Donnelly has can only print one or two colours at a time. Web presses are typically used for things like newspapers or catalogues or other large scale jobs.

Let’s get Digital

At RR Donnelly they also have digital printing capabilities. They use these digital printers for small jobs or jobs that require personalization. It is cheaper and more environmentally friendly to use digital printing for small scale jobs. The pre-press work of creating the plates for the sheet fed or web presses would be wasteful for small jobs and would be costly- therefore they use digital printing. This kind of printing can also be used for customized pieces. If you want to have personalization, then it’s best to go digital. They can change the piece a lot more quickly, efficiently, and not cost an arm and a leg. There is a very fast turnaround time associated with this method and it is best suited to smaller print jobs. These presses are also significantly smaller in size compared to the sheet fed and web presses.

The finishing touches

Once a job comes off the presses it usually isn’t ready for distribution yet. That’s where the finishing side comes in. Print jobs are cut, folded, bound, and or creased before they get distributed. They do this all at RR Donnelly. Dean showed us the several different stations where workers were using different machines and tools to finish different projects. At the one station they were cutting down long strips of menu items for a certain fast food chain. At another station they were folding those thin instruction sheets you get with small electronics. We also saw the machines where they bound booklets. There were two different methods that they used to bind things. One of the methods  was saddle stitch binding where they would either use thread or staples to bind the pages of the booklet together. This is only effective for smaller booklets because of how deep the staple can pierce, or how deep the needle can go.

Larger books are bound with a method called perfect binding, where part of the spine is ground down, and a cover is glued overtop. The finished effect looks like the cover is one cohesive piece instead of three composite parts. Most soft cover books have this kind of binding.

The takeaway

Making an image file on your computer into something real and tangible that you can hold in your hands seems a little like magic if you don’t know what goes into the printing process. You send away an order and a file, and in a couple of days or weeks, your finished product arrives. Meanwhile, in the print shop, there is a lot of hard work involved in helping make your materials perfect before they go out to your stakeholders. Make sure that you communicate just as effectively with your print shop as you do with your stakeholders!

Thank you again to RR Donnelly and Dean for the tour of your facility.