Playing the shell game

When printing collateral or stationery, or just about anything that might be in the same format repeatedly with changing content, consider creating a shell for it.

A shell is simply a pre-printed sheet that you keep in storage and bring out for imprinting as needed. One would often pre-print many more shells than needed at one time, and deplete them over time. A collateral shell may simply be a sheet with a header and/or a footer printed in one or several colors, leaving a large area for later imprinting. After imprinting, it can be scored and folded, die cut, or whatever finishing is desired, to complete the project.

The greatest advantage of printing shells is that they allow for highly flexible printing of content, and in some production processes, allow very low or even one-off printing of very professional-looking collateral.

For instance, one way I've used shells is for sellsheets. Go ahead and say sellsheet shells 5 times fast.

Making your shells

An easy way to make a relatively inexpensive sellsheet is to design a letter- or A4-sized document containing a header and/or footer with the company logo, perhaps a web address or other contact info, a tagline or any other features that show up on every printed marketing piece. This design can contain bleeds, and be composed of one or several plates. It also allows a designer to use coatings and other techniques on the sellsheet which might be cost-prohibitive over a series of spaced small print runs, but minimally impactful on a higher-volume run. Designers also have the option of using specific papers that may be cost prohibitive in low volume, or that aren't even available in low volume.

Instruct the printer to run a high enough quantity of your sellsheet shell design to meet the demand over your desired time period. 3 months, 6 months, a year... it's between you and your client. For instance, if your client's sales team routinely uses about 500 sellsheets per year of each of 5 product lines' collateral, then you're talking about 2500 sellsheets per year. So have your printer make 3000 to allow for make-readies and overs in future imprinting runs.

After the printer has trimmed everything, you have sellsheet shells. Now, on to the imprinting step.

Imprinting your shells

Here's where shells get their shine. When it's time for you to make finished sellsheets (in this case), setup your design files as usual, using the sellsheet shell design as a start. Place all the content into the open area of the sellsheet, and prepare your files for printing.

Then, just before pre-flighting your files, remove the design elements that had been printed on the shells, they were only a guide for you while designing. If you didn't need them there to keep you aware of what was printed on the shell, you could have simply done your imprint design in a separate document altogether.

Collect files for the print job, and send them off for imprinting. Instruct the printer of the specs and quantity needed, and request that they imprint on your preprinted shells, only using the actual shells for final make-readies in setup. Go on the run for a press check and see that registration and other basic alignment is correct. Check for any other inconsistencies with your design. After your satisfied it will print well, approve the job and start imprinting.

You can choose to imprint one, two three, four, or any number of colors when you imprint. For the most part, you are not constrained to the specs of the shell when imprinting because it's a separate print job. To make shells fairly cost-effective, only imprint one color. Since the shell can be printed in more than one color, and use other printing techniques, the finished piece will still communicate a high-quality richness not typically possible for a flexible collateral set. Costs will vary, but typically a shell-based collateral system will cost a little more than one that's not, but shells make up for the cost through a high degree of flexibility coupled with a higher-quality product.

What I've found to be the most flexible use of shells, however, has not been with offset imprinting. I send shells to be imprinted via Docucolor, giving me the ability to make 1 or 100 sellsheets in minutes, if necessary. Using the Docucolor to imprint allows me to run low-volume collateral for special events, conferences, or clients. The tailored finished product is as much a regular marketing piece as any other one and easily fools a reader into thinking of it as one of many mass-produced pieces. Another advantage to using Docucolor is that the cost and volume threshold is less intimidating for content creators.

I've found that, just as designers can get lost and blocked staring at the blank canvas or computer screen, content creators and product experts may have trouble or be wary of committing copy to a piece of collateral that will potentially be around for a while. When you need to just get something for sales and marketing support, it's much easier to convince writers and product experts to provide content when you can say that the Docucolor allows you to print just a few for now without the pressure of printing tons of collateral to acheive economies of scale. This seems to make people comfortable and it's easier to get content out of them to make some material. Sellsheet shells can also be imprinted right there in the office, if there's an emergency or a very low-run specialized piece, making them even more flexible for marketing and sales.

A downside to Docucolor is that Xerox charges your service bureau a set click-rate that you can't avoid. So the unit price for 100 Docucolored imprints is the same as the unit price for one imprint. This can make higher-volume work more expensive than offset and usually inadvisable. But compare the offset numbers against the Docucolor ones to be sure.

Also, when you are considering papers and printing processes for creating your shells, you should take into account the Docucolor and laser printability of your finished piece. Test out your desired paper on a color and a B&W laser printer to make sure the toner will stick to the paper well. I like a matte coated cover-weight sheet, and i like to run an aqueous coating over the header, which gives it a little extra finished look.

So, that's the deal with pre-printed shells, and their imprinting. What do you think? Do you have another way of working to acheive high flexibility with collateral?