When your printer welcomes you to a press-pass with the phrase, ‘what you're about to see is not what you're expecting,’ you know you're in for an interesting afternoon.

We wanted to feature a real hit of colour on our new stationery, as well as giving it some glamour with a holographic foil (which looks better than it sounds, trust me!) and our regular printers Plan 4 took care of the litho and handled a team of suppliers. Due to the availability of weights and other practicalities, we had to be inventive with two coloured stocks from GF Smith and James McNaughton and different inks making the cards the reverse of letterheads.

The screenprinters were concerned that the colour we wanted wouldn't be legible on the cards, so we ended up mixing inks on the fly, adding blue to the opaque white until we reached an acceptable compromise! At the foil blockers, we had to spend time making tiny adjustments to the block to compensate for the movement which the heat process creates, and the guillotine operator will have to trim the cards in a particular order to ensure the margins appear accurate on each side.

These visits were a reminder of how divorced the process of designing on a computer can be from the realities of production. There is no exact science, just the judgement and will of people working together to push the acceptable tolerance of aging machines to their limit!