Printing as manufacturing technology

Regular readers will have noticed that the header and tagline for this site has changed, from Technology for the graphic arts to Graphics to Industrial Printing Journal. It’s a bit of a mouthful but it does describe what the site is about.

In practice there won’t be much of a change to the content because that’s already evolved as I have become more interested in industrial and 3D printing alongside my long term coverage of the commercial graphics printing industry. I’ll still continue to cover all aspects of printing technology, from offset and flexo through to wide format and label printing as well as the related topics such as premedia, colour management, workflow, Management Information Systems and post processing. There’s likely to be more coverage of inks and fluids, materials handling and substrates and the growing use of digital printing in manufacturing. 

This is a natural progression given that the commercial print business itself has changed to become a modern standards-based manufacturing industry. This is most obvious in the labelling and packaging sector where the printing is itself part of a wider manufacturing process. But it’s also become clear to me that a lot of the vendors I’ve been writing about are increasingly pumping their R&D resources into developing solutions for industrial printing, particularly in the wide format sector, and some have also turned their attention to 3D printing. 

There are Domino inkjet heads fitted to this Graphi Mecc foilng unit – one for black ink and one for adhesive for variable data foiling.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what industrial printing is – it can include garments and other textile production, as well as flooring and ceramics. Mostly it involves printing graphics to other products, but can also include using printing technology as part of a manufacturing process, such as using printheads to put adhesive in the right place, or adding foiling or lamination as a functional part of a product rather than just decoration.

So, this does mean that we are going to be covering a very wide range of topics on this site. But the basic issue remains the same for both graphics and industrial printing – how to get the ink to stick to whatever surface it’s aimed at, whilst retaining all the fundamental characteristics such as colour and texture, and all at the right price.

Metal part printed on a Trumpf TruPrint 1000 series.

It’s even more difficult to define 3D printing, which is perhaps more accurately described as additive manufacturing. But the principle is similar – laying down a material, which sometimes does start as a kind of ink, and controlling the characteristics of that material. It may not be obvious how this links back to printing technology but it’s worth noting that a very high proportion of the people currently developing 3D printing systems started off developing graphics printing systems. 

In any case, the aim of this website is to draw these different threads together and to provide some insight into the different technologies and how they can be applied. 


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Comments

2 responses to “Printing as manufacturing technology”

  1. Dustin graupman avatar
    Dustin graupman

    Nessan – I really like the direction you are taking this. Those of us deeply entrenched in the industry see this shift emerging but there are not a lot of resources that seem to be tracking it holistically. I’ll be watching it here. Thanks.

    1. Nessan Cleary avatar
      Nessan Cleary

      Thanks Dustin – I appreciate your comments. I think we will be in for an interesting few years and hopefully it will make for some good stories!

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