Printing

Typewronger offers a risograph print service through our studio space at St Mag's. We can print up to A3 sized posters, we can do A4 and A5 booklets and have five ink drums: black, red, sunflower yellow, blue and fluro-pink! Do please check out the rest of this page for more info on riso printing with prices listed at the bottom, and if you would like to order a job email print@typewronger.com Feel free to ask for a quote for jobs on different paper stock/unusual paper sizes etc.

How Should We Submit Files?

We're going to need your artwork in a black and white pdf and you'll need to tell us which of our five colours you want it printed in. Greyscale images in different colours can be difficult to visualise, so do check out our sample poster at the shop to get a rough idea of how things might look. If you want to print more than one colour you will need to send us separate pdfs for each colour which line up to make the final image. So here you can see two files were submitted, one a black outline of a square, the other a fully black square. We send the black outline to the black drum and the black square to the red drum and presto! A red square with a black border.

The images need to be perfectly aligned so that they "register" - if you submit files that don't register it'll show. Lyra is accurate to within about 3mm, meaning you could get as much as a 3mm shift in registration from copy to copy - this is one of the idiosyncrasies of riso printing - it's a part of why we love it! To limit registration errors it can be an idea to have thick black outlines that you colour into. For instance above you'll notice the black outline and the filled-in black square are in fact almost the same size, so when the filled one gets sent to the red drum the red and black merge seamlessly as the black is darker than the red colouring into it. It can be fun to play around with registration - some people deliberately misregister their images as an aesthetic choice - in the example below some wag has deliberately shifted the file being sent to the red drum a bit to the bottom and right so the colour and linework don't quite match. How funky. How Andy Warhol.*

So you've only got five colours?

Yes! And as a general rule I would advise against using all of them on one work - two is plenty, three an extravagance! If you feel like a pro you could try mixing our colours - for instance if you had two greyscale circles and sent one to the red drum and the other to the blue, you could overlay them for... purple? 

If you're a wizard that is - we're certainly not going to make any promises about the sort of result you're gonna get! You can also print greyscale images, but these might well come out distinctly lo-fi, looking a bit like the image of Lyra above. You could run that through a colour drum instead of black and white for an even funkier look! Do bear in mind we can also get you all sorts of different colours of paper, which can add an extra dynamic to your poster or zine!

There's a lot that you can do with riso, but you have to approach it realising it looks very different to conventional printing. For advice do drop by the shop to take a look at various examples of riso printing or email print@typewronger.com

Pricing

These prices are based on printing on 135gsm natural recycled paper, or our natural sugar paper. We can also offer a selection of coloured papers of various weights. Covers are single side printed and can be a different colour to the main work, we can also use a heavyer paper. We have a selection of marbled papers, you can let us know if there's a particular colour you would like to dominate.  We can also produce A4 booklets and can now provide an ersatz CMYK (blue, fluro-pink, sunflower-yellow and black) service which makes colour photographs look like they've gone through some fancy insta filter - again, email us for details! We aim to get most jobs turned around within two weeks though simple poster printing goes quicker than big booklets, and if you're after specific papers we'll need to factor in delivery times. 

GOLD and Ersatz CMYK

We now have a metalic gold ink drum! This is a very unusual riso colour as the ink is three times as expensive as normal riso ink and as a result most print shops wouldn't dedicate a drum to it, however when printed on or alongside black or dark grey the effect is stunning. If you would like to print in metalic gold do drop us an email or pop by the shop for a chat. As the ink is indeed very expensive we would charge you the same for gold as we would for trichrome (three colour) printing, but my is it worth it!

And what, you might well ask, is "Ersatz CMYK"? CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black). These are very specific colours which you will find in most home printers, and it is by combining these that full colour prints are made. Our riso machine can mimic this by replacing Cyan with Blue, Magenta with Fluro-Pink and Yellow with Sunflower Yellow. As these colours are all slightly different to true CMYK the colours will all be slightly off, giving an insta-filter effect on colour photographs for example. It looks pretty cool, though it's not how riso was intended, we'll do it for the same price as a trichrome job plus £50 if you want us to seperate your original image for you.

• that is grosly unfair, Andy Warhol's registration was pretty spot on, but you know what I mean - it's art, darling!