How Disc Makers Gang Runs Your CD Covers

Hi,  CEO of Disc Makers. Today, I want to take you behind the scene and explain to you what gang running means. And, specifically to your project, what it means when we gang-run your graphics, your printed packaging. You see, when we do the professional printing of your Digipacks or your wallets or your CD inserts, we don’t print them just one to a sheet on a small printer that has a sheet the exact size of your artwork. Our professional printing presses use a large sheet that’s 23 by 29 inches  and we try to minimize the waste on the sheet by filling up the sheet with multiple versions  of a project.

And what gang running means is, like you can see on this sheet, we actually have  four projects on the sheet. This is something that dates back to the time of offset printing, and we  still do some offset printing. You see, during offset printing, every new project requires a setup and that setup takes time. And so, in order to minimize setups, you want to run as many sheets as possible. So, on a sheet like I just showed you, if all the artwork was of one project, I would only be able to run a quarter of the sheets compared to if all the artwork was from a different project like I showed you.

Here’s a better example maybe.

This is a sheet where you can see ganged one project ‘one up’ and another project is ‘two up.’ So, let’s say this client ordered 500 pieces and this client ordered a thousand pieces.  I can run 500 sheets and get 500 of this cover and a thousand of the other cover.  So, it’s highly efficient, but it does mean that there are some accommodations from time to time that have to be made.

If, you know, you want to, the color on average  is called commercial color you want the color on the whole sheet to work as well as possible,  and so if you have, for example, a job with a lot of red here, and the job,  you know, runs through the press, the sheet runs through the press this way,  if you have a lot of red here, you don’t want to have a project with a lot of blue here because  if the press operator is adjusting some of the red tint, he would or she would inadvertently  potentially adjust, you know, the colors on a project that doesn’t have a lot of red in it.

Our team is really good at doing this and so they know exactly how to gang.

And obviously, with digital print nowadays, the setups are a little less of an issue, but we still have to cut all the sheets. And so, the longer the runs, the bigger the stacks of sheets, the more efficiencies we gain with cutting the sheets. One of the things that we also try to do is minimize waste.

So, with a layout like a wallet, you can see how we nest them together to minimize the empty spaces on the sheet. And then, after we do all the printing, the wallet printing, the paper printing, the jacket printing, all the board product has to run through a die cutter.

So, we have dies that are basically made with cutting blades that are aligned  exactly with our design templates for how we gang the projects on the sheet. And then when it runs  through the die cutter, you can see that the end product that comes out of the die cutter, and  this is already a cut sheet, is a sheet that has a bunch of projects on it that are all die-cut. And  after the die-cutting, they are basically stripped out of the sheet.

Each one of these jackets  is stripped out. Of course, we do this with a stack of sheets. And then, it will eventually run through a folder-gluer that will fold and glue the printed sheet into a printed jacket.  So that is gang running. This will happen to your project, as well.

At very high quality, at very high speed except if you place a really large order of multiple thousands, at which point your job will basically fill up all the positions on the sheet.  I hope you found this helpful. I look forward to seeing you next time.

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