Our large poster printing, or giant poster printing, is amazing. We carefully selected three media/paper types that probably covers about 90% of all large format printing.

Our glossy and matte photo papers cover everything from large scale photograph printing to movie posters, and our banner vinyl is outstanding for just about any indoor or outdoor event including events, expos, reunions, exhibitions and more.

We’re currently looking into an adhesive vinyl which is a peel and stick material that can be installed on almost any surface in any weather condition. It can also be removed and reused many times over since the adhesive never weakens. This new media will make an excellent addition to our giant poster printing services.

Brochures are still a great way to provide important information regarding your business to clients. It’s a more “personal” and useful method that can be combined with other forms of marketing including digital. When printing your next batch of brochures, consider these tips.

1. Unique Info - First, don’t try and regurgitate the same information from your website. Condense and fine tune which information deserves paper real estate and try to offer unique information not available through any other marketing medium. This could include one of your social networks, some useful tips (we’ll hit on this again later), different photographs..anything.

2. Make it a keeper - Give your brochure purpose and reason for customers to keep it. For instance, a paint company could show off color palettes, offer painting tips, list advantages of the different paint brands etc. Basically, anything that entices customers to magnet that sucker to the fridge. Adding coupons with a call-to-action works great too.

3. Value in your words - Make absolutely sure all segments of information on the brochure is valuable. Remember, providing every single detail about your business is not necessary. The information should be concise and beneficial to readers.

4. Use high quality graphics - Listen, print is a medium where high quality photographs can make a serious imprint onto customers. Refrain from using web graphics that are way to low in resolution to look appealing and stay away from utilizing clip art.

5. Hire a designer - If you’re a designer or have a good eye for design….great. But if not, recognize this weakness and hire someone that can develop a well designed brochure that properly relays your brand’s message. A brochure can demonstrate your professionalism, quirkiness or love for a product, but that’s a double-edged sword. Poorly designed brochures can make a business appear unprofessional.

6. Contact information - A brochure should include all of your contact information. Because a brochure is longer than a business card, it gives you the opportunity to provide contacts with more than your phone number and email address—as Sarah Jacobsson Purewal suggests at PC World, “Instead of including only your usual social media handles for Twitter and Facebook, for instance, consider adding a link to your Yelp page.”

7. Call to action - Don’t assume your audience will be moved to contact you or purchase your product or services after they read your well-crafted brochure. The call to action is the extra push that, for many readers, makes the difference between simply reading your brochure and acting upon it.

Good luck with designing your next brochure. We hope these tips help.

1. Check browser - To ensure your browser has Javascript enabled, please read this article on Google’s website, How to Enable JavaScript.

2. It may be a firewall - If your browser has JavaScript enabled, then a personal or network firewall could be disabling it. In this case, you must open up the firewall and find the correct setting or meet with your network administrator.

For immediate assistance, please call us at 843.379.1198 (M-F 10-4pm EST), 800.676.0856 (after hours) or email us. We are more than happy to help you place an order over the phone.

The team at PrintKEG is proud to announce we’ve added vinyl (15 mil) to our banner printing services. Additionally, we’ve added a bunch of new sizes up to 8 feet long to accommodate the many effective ways to “say it big.”

All vinyl banners are printed full color with no limit whatsoever. It was important to us to offer a thick, high quality vinyl banner product while maintaining the cheap prices we’re known for. And we’ve succeeded.

An important thing to understand about our vinyl banners is how to use them. These banners are beautiful for any indoor situation and will last a very long time. For outdoor use, our banners can last for about six months to one year and are perfect for grand openings, festivals, outdoor events, promotions, birthdays, expos and more. The usability time increases greatly if brought inside when the event is over or promotion ends etc. For instance, a 2-week annual festival will find our banners useful for many years.

Our vinyl banners are not intended to be used as permanent outdoor signage for over one year. In most cases, we have found our vinyl banners to fit almost any need. Here are some ideas on what you can do with vinyl banners.

If you have any questions regarding your next banner project, please feel free to call or contact us.

We’ve been a little slow in implementing new sizes for business cards, but it’s finally happened. As designers and artists become more creative, we are happy to announce two new business card sizes.

First, we’re offering a slimmer option at the size of 3.5″ X 1.75.” I have seen some really nice designs implemented for slim business cards and I’m looking forward to what our customers turn in.

There’s no question that square prints are incredibly popular nowadays. In the past, we’ve launched square flyers, stickers and booklets and all three products have proved wildly successful. I guess it was inevitable that we would finally launch the square business card measuring at “2 X 2.”

Like our standard sized business cards, these new sizes are available on our three heavy card stocks. To see some business card examples or design ideas, visit our business card board on Pinterest.

Last month, PrintKEG was fortunate to experience the highest revenue ever for a February beating last year by a whopping 25%! To me, this feels like such a huge accomplishment especially since the print media is continuously getting beat down by the digital realm. Thank you to every single person who has ordered, considered ordering or has visited our website. Every single one of you is important to us.

But how did we get here? As a small businessperson, it’s tough to measure every aspect of the company, but sometimes it’s a no-brainer. Of course, our amazing prices have a huge impact on revenue, but it’s our customer service and quality that brings everything together. It wouldn’t matter if we gave away prints for free if the service behind the product was no good. We take our PrintKEG Promise seriously and caring for recurring customers is our #1 priority. Sure, new sales and prospects are important to us, but it’s the people coming back that allows us to flourish and become a better company.

We’re still a few weeks away from finally adding vinyl banners and decals to the mix. Our team is also researching whether we can efficiently provide canvas giclée printing and window signage at cheap prices. One thing is clear: Great new products are on the way. We’ve launched new products before and while some we’ve discontinued, these new additions I’m extremely excited about.

Once again, thanks to every single one of you. We really do appreciate every customer and look forward to continuing the growth of our little print shop in South Carolina!

Chris Mullen
PrintKEG Co-founder
Connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn

Undoubtedly, PrintKEG prints some seriously nice booklets and newsletters. Each booklet is full bleed, saddle-stiched (fancy term for stapled) and full color making them great for almost any book type including comic books, calendars, event guides, and playbills. Our customers receive a super high-quality item for unbelievably low prices.

We’ve explained our options to a degree, but clearly it’s time to explain each of the booklet/newsletter options in more detail.

Size - Currently, we offer three extremely popular sizes (Half Size, Full Size and CD Book). Half-sized booklets measure 5.5″ X 8.5″ once finished, or folded, and they’re great for almost any occasion (guides, graphic novels, playbills) while literally costing half the normal price. Our full sized books measure 8.5″ X 11″ after folding and are perfect for newsletters and magazines. Our square CD books measure 4.75″ X 4.75″ once folded and are utilized as…CD booklets. As of late, square print sizes have risen greatly in popularity so we’ve printed some interesting concepts that are not-so-CD-bookish.

Pages - This seems to be confusing for some. Basically, a booklet has to be at least four pages (one sheet folded becomes four pages) which means all booklet page counts must be in multiples of four. This is why we offer options that read like “8 pages / 2 sheets.” This accommodates people thinking in terms of sheets and those counting pages in the document. The cover is “page 1.”

Paper - Now it’s time to select the paper type. There’s a chance to select a thicker cover later if desired. Each paper we offer is specifically engineered for booklet purposes. Customers are simply choosing whether the booklet is to be glossy, uncoated or utilize a 100% recycled paper. Glossy is our most ordered paper; therefore it is the cheapest in price yet not quality. Our uncoated paper is similar to a matte paper product, and 100% recycled is “greener.” All three papers make wonderful inner pages to any booklet, magazine or newsletter.

# of Books - It’s nice to be able to order two books or six hundred and not be gouged in price. Our website allows order quantities up to fifteen hundred booklets. Customers needing higher quantities are asked to speak with a PrintKEG representative since some orders may be outside the scope of “short run printing” which is what we focus on. We’ve printed many booklet order over fifteen hundred, but we like to attain more information before accepting the work.

Upgrade Cover? At this time, customers are given an opportunity to make the cover a little thicker. There are only two options: Glossy and uncoated. We recommend choosing a glossy cover if the inner pages are going to be glossy. We’ve been searching for a 100% recycled cover, but have not been successful in locating one we’re comfortable with.

Proof? - In each case, we prefer customers to receive a physical proof before moving forward with printing final order. This ensures the booklet appears as intended, and allows for a final opportunity to locate unnoticed errors. Proof can be mailed via standard or next day but all proofs will have a transit time of no longer than three days. If UPS Ground would take more than three days to reach destination, we upgrade the shipping at no extra cost.

Despite offering a “no proof” option, we cannot guarantee top-quality booklets for customers selecting the “no proof” type. We only offer
“no proof” since some customers are under a serious time crunch.

Setup. Customers must choose the size of the book to configure a setup fee. We intend to automate this step in the future. In most cases, our designers must actually adjust art to ensure prints are properly tailored to our processes. We search for obvious mistakes and we initiate a thorough and investigative quality assurance process that goes beyond what is required by other print products such as flyers and postcards.

Finally…

I hope that clears up some information about our booklet printing, but if you have any questions at all please feel free to contact us. We would love to hear about your upcoming project!

This upcoming week, the PrintKEG development team will be focusing on improving our mobile website. We created it over a year ago, and it is fully functional, but we haven’t done much with it since it’s original launch.

We know how important our mobile website is especially as social media dominates each of our universes. While I personally intend to preserve our core design, I’m thinking of adding a more “Windows Metro” feel to it with a touch of Threadless appeal. More significantly, the social aspect will be improved as we allow Instagram, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter to play larger roles in our mobile ecosystem.

A large piece of this endeavor is also ensuring browser and device compatibility. We’ve tested our mobile and standard website on numerous tablets and devices and this week we’re affirming interoperability by performing updated tests on new devices per a Best Buy visit (I look for any reason stop in). We’ll be posting pictures via Instagram, Flickr, Posterous and Tumblr (@printkeg).

By the end of the week, we’re expecting a refreshing mobile design that we’ll proudly announce to everyone once completed.

Through the years, we’ve received many requests for a matte alternative so we’re happy to announce starting next week, we’re adding a Matte Photo Paper, which provides the same color richness as our photo gloss, but with more elegance and with less shine.

Next month, we’ll be receiving our new Canon wide format printer to be dedicated for outdoor vinyl banners. This new printer will also allow us to expand into new markets down the road including canvas, decals, phone covers, window signage and much more.

We’re very excited about the possibilities!

Oh yeah, the digital world is a real hater when it comes to paper business cards, but cards still play an essential role in marketing and credibility. Like stationery, business cards play a more personal role in offering contact information to a client. Additionally, the more ways a customer’s attention is drawn to a brand, the more likely a sale will be made.

Sure, the design of any business card hugely affects it’s effectiveness, but also carefully consider what contact information is included while not trying to cram every line of communication in there. Here are some ideas:

1. No more than two phone numbers. Choose wisely and keep it clean. If you add a fax line (ack!) then that counts as one number. I recommend only one phone number, but some companies rely on faxes for orders (that’s absurd!).

2. Stick to good typography. Unless your company relies on a mascot for branding, try to stray away from photos or clip art. Carefully consider typography since it can have such a huge impact on design.

3. Social media is key. Nowadays, I can’t see how we can avoid social media on our business cards. Before just throwing up a long Facebook link, consider Twitter, Flickr or Pinterest since those outlets might actually be more beneficial for clients and your business. For instance, we are adding Flickr to our cards so people can view print samples quickly and easily.

4. Forget about titles. Titles take up valuable real estate on the business card. Only add your title if it is absolutely necessary. Does adding “Sales Representative” really make a huge difference? Probably not.

5. Limit email addresses and URL’s. My goodness, don’t stuff a ton of emails and URL’s onto one card. One email, company website and a single social media spot is plenty.

We hope these ideas are helpful in your quest of creating an optimal business card. Learn more about our business card printing. See more tips on our business blog, PrintReady.co.