Here at Essential Print Services, we love receiving printed newsletters in the post, especially from ‘Keep Me Posted’ – a campaign that allows the consumer to choose how they receive important information from big organisations.

Check out three of our favourite facts from the newsletter:
1) Reading from paper requires 21% less mental effort than from a screen.
2) 83% state a clear preference for reading complicated documents on paper.
3) Almost 1 in 10 adults (4.8m) UK adults have never used the internet.

Going back to point no. 1; some of our clients do struggle to proof read their flyers and brochures on-screen. You must have experienced this at some point yourself, especially when you’re tired or distracted.

Recently, we had a call from a lady who’d like 50 copies of a 200-page book printing – this is not a problem for Essential Print Services. We can print books of all shapes and sizes. Using our client’s word document, we also helped them create print-ready files for the text and the cover.

When it came to proofing the PDF, we found that after each proof, the client spotted more and more things, even though they had supplied the artwork themselves. How could this be?

From reading the ‘Keep Me Posted’ newsletter, we now understand why this was happening – the client had never printed out the pages.

Who would? There are 200 A5 sheets in this printed book. Not many people are going to print 200 sheets at home or in the office, certainly not all at once.

Our lovely new customer was obviously finding it difficult to read all of their text on-screen. Once we recognised this, we decided to produce a printed proof, free of charge* so they could spend some quality time having a proper read. They were so grateful and made future amendments so much easier.

The moral of the story is; printed proofs may cost money to produce, but, the job will cost even more if errors remain unnoticed and you have to print it twice!

Here are some hints and tips on how to approve a proof read >>> “How to approve a proof”

If you need help with a new or existing project, get in touch. Call 01332 418377, email printangels@essentialprintservices.co.uk or chat to us online.

(*Whenever possible, we do offer free printed proofs. If the printed proofs require specialist finishes or papers, we will ask for a contribution towards the costs).

Technology and small businesses often don’t mix. Company owners are busy enough without the hassle of setting up or fixing their own computers. So, we’ve asked our friend, Owen Conti from Code 56, to share his hints and tips with you:

Last month we helped out a customer who came to us with a laptop that suddenly wouldn’t turn on, and asked us to take a look at it. They also let us know that they didn’t have a backup.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news for their laptop (economically, there was nothing we could do), but the silver lining was that we could recover the information for them.

In other cases, we’ve not been able to recover information, and that is why backups are so critical.

The idea of backing up files often conjures up ideas of jobs that take hours to run and loads of extra storage space somewhere. This doesn’t always have to be the case.

In our earlier example, there was only 1 folder that our customer really cared about; it represented months of work and would be impossible to replicate from scratch. For this customer, a great way to back this up would’ve been to keep a copy (and we’ll come back to that) in something like their OneDrive or DropBox account. Often these will come with a small amount of space for free (2 – 5GB), which would’ve been ample for this example. This way a copy of their files would’ve sync’d to their account and they could recover it just by logging in from another computer.

The trick is to make sure you actually have multiple copies though. Having your “working version” in DropBox (or similar) and sync’d on two computers is a step in the right direction, but if something happened to your account (we’ve seen people have some bizarre account issues before) you might lose access to your files in a recovery scenario. We always recommend at least 3 copies be kept for something to be considered “backed up”. (Some Photographers we know keep a minimum of 5 copies of everything!)

Essentially, a good backup strategy is one that focuses on what is really important in a “recovery” scenario and maintaining multiple copies of those items.

That sounds quite daunting, and a bit of a headache to keep track of, but there are some really good applications out there that take care of backing everything up for you with minimal effort. Some of them are even built into your computer: in Windows 10 just search for “Backup Settings”, and on Mac OS look for “Time Machine”.

By all means, if you have any questions or would like some help, please feel free to get in touch. Simply drop the Print Angels an email and they’ll make the introduction.