Anytime one of our loyal U.S. Press customers orders a booklet – be it saddle stitched or perfect bound – the order’s production includes a few steps. Most of these steps revolve around a process called collating. Let’s take a look inside the U.S. Press production facility and learn more about booklet printing, collating and binding.
What is Collating?
By now, you may be wondering what the word collating even means. Collating means “to place documents in proper order.” For booklets and catalogs, that means placing the pages in the correct order. That is, of course, very necessary in booklet production! With nearly forty years of experience in booklet production and collated printing, our team at U.S. Press has mastered the art of collated printing so that your booklets and catalogs turn out to be a huge success.
How Does Collating Work?
Collating works like this: You have four stacks of documents, labeled 1 through 4. Likely, you’ll have a large stack of each, pulling one document from each stack and placing it in order with the other three, then repeating the process from the beginning. It sounds tedious, but with just ten or fifteen minutes of experience, you can almost collate with your eyes closed. But with orders of bigger, more complex booklets, we rely on technology to help the collating process along.
We rely on a state-of-the art collating machine to help organize larger stacks of pages for bigger booklets. An 80- or 100-page booklet will be collated from a few different stacks containing a series of 30 or more pages per stack. As they’re printed in sequence, the collator separates each series of pages within its larger stack. Our production specialists can then grab 20 or 30 pages at a time to collate into booklets. After that, a quick trip through the binder and the booklets are ready to ship.
What does it Mean for You?
Now that you’ve taken an impromptu trip into the production facility here at U.S. Press, you’re probably wondering why this matters. Sure, we all like knowing that the products we buy are well-produced and can get to us in a timely manner, but mostly we’re just concerned with receiving our products when and how we want them. But understanding collating and the technology that helps to expedite it is to understand the nature of booklet production at U.S. Press. And we’re proud to announce that with new investments in our collating technology, we’re even more capable of producing full-color booklets quickly and efficiently. Whatever booklet you can conceive, in whatever size and page-count you need, we can print.
We’d Love to Work for You
We’re more than just capable – we’re excited. Because not only are we offering bigger, better booklets, we’re offering what we always offer: Our years of experience and the knowledge that comes with it, our dedicated, industry leading customer service, and the type of dedication that will help your company succeed.
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