We offer full colour, digital “UV Printing” as an option of having your designs and artwork printed onto binders and boxes, but what actually is UV Printing?
We should point out quickly what it isn’t (which it gets confused for) which is a glossy varnish which is placed on top of images on printed paper to make them shine. That is a “Spot UV Varnish”.
A UV printer is essentially a flat bed printer with an arm that has print heads mounted within it that goes back and forth over whatever is being printed onto, so much the same as a normal inkjet printer, but with some differences, which we'll outline below.
So how does it work?
UV Printing, is a printing technique that uses specially formulated ink that cures (hardens) the moment it comes into contact with Ultra Violet light. The printing technique is very similar to an inkjet printer, a printer head with six or more colour inks, runs back and forth across a substrate, in our case a cover, but right behind the print head sits an ultra violet lamp instantly hardening the ink. The hardening and drying (curing) of the Ink happens so quickly, that the wet ink does not have a chance to spread. This means that designs can be printed on to materials like plastic, wood and metal that ordinary printers can’t print onto because that ink would just spread off before it finally dries. Another advantage is that because you have that instant curing (hardening), UV printing gives you a very high resolution achieving much finer detail/ higher than other types of printing.
Breaking down the chemical composition of UV ink, it uses pigments, binders, and photo initiators, which creates a cross-linking chain effect once the ultraviolet light hits it at a certain wavelength. This process causes the ink to harden.
For Hartnack and Co, UV printing works best on our buckram cloth which is an Acrylic coated rayon book cloth. Technically it can be done on standard rayon book-cloth but the print comes out quite dull. Our experience using genuine Leather for adherence has been mixed, so we prefer to stick with Buckram.
Artwork
Supplied artwork for printing is different to that of embossing. Like embossing, artwork still needs to be in a vector format (not PNG or JPEG) and any fonts need to vectorised and outlined, however unlike artwork for embossing, artwork for UV printing has to be full colour CMYK. More information on what's required can be found here: What artwork do I need to supply
One of the other advantages to colour UV Printing is that if you have multiple pieces of artwork that you want on a cover, then the end product can be for nearly the same price as having multiple foil embossings. Both require a large amount of set-up time and artworking time, but the UV print offers full colour and a lot more creativity as per the examples below.
