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The Other Parts Of Our Group. Part 1 – HAD-COPY.

You know us for print, and I think you’ll agree we’re pretty good at what we do here at HAD-“PRINT” as part of the HAD-GROUP. However, do you know what else we offer as part of our group of companies which may assist in helping you, your business or your organisation strive and succeed?

Over the next few weeks, we will look at the other sectors and divisions forming parts of our company group. Part 1, and a first look at our Photocopier and Printer sales division, which, although similar to our Print division here at HAD-PRINT, HAD-COPY offers businesses unique, modern and advanced solutions to their day-to-day office-based printing requirements.

About HAD-COPY

Here at HAD-COPY, we aim to build great relationships with every customer we work with by listening to your needs and wants to provide quality products, solutions, print audits, and much more. 

With decades of experience and having created a reputation for delivering superior products at competitive prices without compromising our services, it proves that HAD-COPY can be the right company for you.

The team at HAD-COPY are skilled, experienced practitioners of workplace technology integration. Utilising office multi-function device, inbound mail can be scanned and digitally delivered. Remote users can all print to the same device, allowing for business efficiencies through more innovative cost control.

Yorkshire’s Konica Minolta Specialist

We are proud to say we are one of Konica Minolta’s premium partners and an independent supplier of their photocopiers and printers. This leading, well-established brand of over 150 years manufactures machines that can help you transform your working environment into a digitally connected workspace and help optimise how businesses work. These machines offer fast printing, high-quality copying, scanning to PDF, the latest tech features, and cloud printing. All these elements are great features to enable your business to grow.

As an independent supplier of photocopiers & printers, we partner with best-of-breed manufacturers to provide an exceptional product portfolio. Coupled with ancillary products and software solutions to optimise your workplace. Our product pages detail the full range of devices available.

We know any investment is a significant step for any business. So, validating the how and the wherefores is essential to ensure you are doing the right thing. We offer a no-obligation print/device audit to establish your current usage and performance of your existing equipment. We can illustrate how your proposal can work to maximise your workplace environment. This will demonstrate the efficiencies of renewing and upgrading your equipment.

Our Offices in Selby and York, cover all the local communities of North Yorkshire, East Yorkshire, the Humber region and North Lincolnshire including, Barton, Bedale, Beverley, Bolton Abbey, Boroughbridge, Bridlington, Brotherton, Brough, Cleethorpes, Driffield, Easingwold, Eggborough, Filey, Gainsborough, Grassington, Grimsby, Goole, Harrogate, Hawes, Hedon, Helmsley, Hessle, Hornsea, Howden, Hull, Immingham, Kirkbymoorside, Knaresborough, Leyburn, Malton, Masham, Market Weighton, Middlesborough, Northallerton, Patley Bridge, Pickering, Pocklington, Redcar, Richmond, Ripon, Saltburn, Scarborough, Scunthorpe, Settle, Sherburn, Skipton, Stamford Bridge, Stokesley, Snaith, Tadcaster, Thirsk, Thornaby, Tockwith, Withernsea, Whitby, Womersley, Wressle, Yarm.

Our Offices in Halifax cover all the local communities of West Yorkshire & South Yorkshire including Aberford, Ackworth, Askern, Barnsley, Batley, Bawtry, Bingley, Boston Spa, Bradford, Brighouse, Burley, Castleford, Cleckheaton, Crigglestone, Crofton, Conisbrough, Denby Dale, Dewsbury, Doncaster, Elland, Featherstone, Garforth, Guiseley, Hebden Bridge, Heckmondwike, Hemsworth, Holmfirth, Horbury, Horsforth, Huddersfield, Ilkley, Keighley, Kippax, Knottingley, Leeds, Mexborough, Micklefield, Morley, Normanton, Ossett, Otley, Pontefract, Pudsey, Rotherham, Rothwell, Sheffield, Shipley, South Elmsall, South Milford, Sowerby Bridge, Stanley, Stockbridge, Swinton, Tickhill, Todmorden, Thorne, Wakefield, Wath Upon Dearne, Walton, Wetherby.

We cover the whole of Yorkshire, and many of the surrounding counties. Please get in touch for more information.

HAD-COPY
www.had-copy.business
[email protected]

+44(0)333 320 86 84

No hiding… honesty is one of our values

We often get asked to competitively pitch on projects. And occasionally we say no, we’re not going to quote when we see what we’re against. We don’t do race to the bottom. However recently we’ve had feedback from an end user who showed us what was advertised and what they got. The original specification sheet and the supplied polo shirt were nowhere near a match.

What we do…

  • Our garment proposal sheets, feature clear positionals and photos of the proposed garments.
  • We only specify garments we know and trust.
  • We provide honest advice on what will work in different print and embellishment methods – some are better than others at different things.
  • Honest charging and can suggest the right breakpoints to achieve cost performance points.
  • We provide options to enhance the end-user experience – tagging and bagging or packing.

So, with the case study above, we’d ensure that a heavier-weight garment was specified to match the end user’s environment. It also takes a detailed print better. The proposed garment had opportunities for further trimming or embellishment to add value to the merchandise proposition.  We would offer an option for branded tagging, if you wanted an end-user experience to be delivered more “branded” we can recommend easily branded pain packaging to deliver within a cost budget. This packaging can also be nearly plastic-free for better environmental credentials.

If you are in a specific sector, we understand that your market audience has expectations. A good example of this is motorsport, where attention to detail, and specification of the performance vehicles is matched by the specification and detail of the apparel used. Whether two-tone garments, garments with colour panels, or piped trim, detail in print and embroidery is absolutely critical.

Part of our service is the fact we spend considerable time getting to know the products we use. Whether this is getting touchy-feely at trade shows and roadshows, getting samples in and putting them to the physical test.

Talking of physical tests… in the last year, we’ve rejected 2 items on our testing programme. These include workwear boots, which were inconsistently manufactured and the product support through wholesale and distribution didn’t match our expectations. The other was a Hoodie, which bobbled on after the second wash.

The crux is, if you value your brand, doing the right thing sometimes takes a bit of a bottle. If you are doing merchandise, think about the sales journey, reviews, product evaluations, and user-generated content is now major selling points. If you go on a race to the bottom and don’t have honest sales collateral you will get adverse responses from your valued customers, audience, followers or the better description for them – stakeholders.

The hidden difference in good print.

So, you’re about to invest in some print-based marketing to help you achieve some physical touch points with your customers. However, you’re looking at the budget and thinking, well I can save some wedge here… Wrong! For anyone with an ounce of common sense, this article won’t be a shocker. It’s the old adage of what goes in adds up to the net result. It always surprises us, when people want absolute top-notch results, and provide artwork for print from the likes of Canva or Publisher. Ask any good professional, and the answer will come back as a resounding Adobe CS suite, in particular, for page layout Indesign and Illustrator. Let’s unpack why…

Downsides of Canva or Publisher…

  • • Dubious standards of PDF creation within these applications. Adobe invented PDF and when written to the right standards, no issues with fonts behaving differently, colour spaces (or ICC profiles) which reflect the end result are properly curated into the PDF
  • • Let’s touch on it, both of the two applications mentioned above, don’t have a fine pedigree with nicely finessed typography. The Adobe CS suite maximises the features within OTF (Open Type Fonts), which provides exceptional tracking information on the spacing between characters and utilises the ligatures properly within the additional characters that exist in OTF fonts. Also remember that Adobe was the creator of Postscript fonts in the first place, so the pedigree is there again.
  • • Colour management starts well before the creation of a PDF for print. How colour is handled whether it is RGB or CMYK (best for print) or other colour spaces. Adobe has influenced and set standards for colour management since the 1990s at the start of desktop publishing.
  • • The tools within PDF creation for print within these applications are very limited, again Adobe CS suite makes bleed and trim marks effortless, without any forethought.

So, the other downside of the tale is when someone has all the tools and doesn’t know how to use them. Yes, you can have Adobe CS suite, however, knowing how things work goes a long way.

  • • Image preparation – finessing the detail, and knowing how you make the right technical tweaks can go a long way from average to stunning. We’ve retouched images which needed detail carefully added back in, getting the tonal balance right, and understanding the limitations of the print process for highlights and shadows. Within recent history, it was known to have specialists for this job to maximise the results from scanned transparencies to produce results which were crisper than sharp and visually said wow on the page.
  • • Accept that certain items like logos should be vector-based artwork; such as .eps .ai .svg and certain types of .pdf – a vector graphic is a mathematical format which describes key points on the outline and tells where to fill with colour or what stroke width to apply. Why are these great; they scale and remain sharp at whatever size you use them. No raggy edges from bitmap raster-based formats which don’t scale.
  • • Without sounding old, the art of good typography is dead. Back when I was a junior in graphic design studios, senior designers would issue substantive scorn on poorly tracked, kerned characters in typeset copy. The text should flow and connect with good spacing which aids the reader to enjoy reading said textual copy. Again Adobe CS suite allows this to be handled with ease. (also add in Quark Xpress for anyone still using it!)

Design your page for how it is going to be produced, I was taught about designing for the medium of production. Unfortunately, these days aesthetics override considerations of the HOW. We use to have to consider when designing a brand of communications how they were going to be produced. Silk Screen print was still big in the 1990s for large format billboard advertising, limitations of entry-level small format litho printing were totally different from commercial colour litho, however, the entry cost points also reflected this. Designing to meet these criteria along with the client’s budget and also maximising the result.

We can instantly pull out a piece of artwork, which we know has been artworked up properly (or pukka as we say) – it stands out as effortless, it just works. We can always identify the artwork (even before we’ve looked at the metadata on the file which tells us how it originated) which just has small tell-tale giveaways. We know when we see a file from MS Publisher, colour space will be an issue, the colour will shift from corporate colours in RGB (Microsoft’s default colour space) to CMYK, fonts will look uncomfortable on the page, and yes, we’ve seen horrific things to type from Publisher, with additional strokes to embolden beyond Black or ExtraBold fonts.
Equally, we know that the definitions on PDF files from Canva are dubious, with it struggling to define the Art Box / Bleed Box / Trim Box / Media Box / Crop Box’s within the page description in the PDF file – sorry very technical there. PS Canva isn’t big on colour management either.

So as with anything fine in life, the result you get boils down to the quality of what you put in. I will accept over time perhaps the dreaded Canva might get better, however, initial impressions are very limited. So if you’re specifying for print with good results, think about the how, – how it is created, how it is going produced as a physical item, this will affect some thinking. Equally, don’t ask a web design agency to artwork your print… we don’t get involved in web online stuff, as we are professionals in print. Good artwork/design people for print, have decades of working in the environment and knowing how materials will handle different ink coverages. A good print designer / artworker will make very good suggestions when specifying what paper stocks and finishing processes to enhance the end result to maximise the result in line with the design and artwork.

So, why this blog now, we’ve seen some shockers over the past few weeks, call it therapy, if we don’t walk about it, we’ll just get grumpy. So, if you want stunning print, ask us at the beginning. It’s our trade, we’re not agency wallers pumping it to an internet shed, production is on-site, real live for us – real pukka print.



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