What is flexographic printing?

Flexography is a modern version of letterpress printing. This is a traditional printing system where it can be used on almost any type of material, including corrugated cardboard, cellophane, plastic, labels, fabric, and metallic film.

Flexographic printing uses flexible photopolymer printing plates wrapped around rotating cylinders on a web press. Ink plates have a slightly raised image and rotate at high speeds to transfer the image to the substrate.

Flexography features to consider in the design process

Flexography like all printing processes has problems if they are not well managed with shadows, fonts, inks, ink colors, image resolution and image formats. Therefore, the way the design is made will affect the print quality that is obtained in the end in a flexographic printing, so it is important to master the requirements when making a design for flexographic printing.

A small example is the minimum font sizes used for serif or sans serif types, if you are printing on coated corrugated paper, uncoated newsprint, a polyester film or other substrates this will affect the final sample of the design made. . For most designs the recommended font range is 4 points to 10 points. Sans serif type can generally be printed smaller than serif type.

Flexo inks

Flexography uses semi-liquid inks that handle fast drying. Today with the rise of digital printing, flexo is positioning itself in the areas of large orders, particularly packaging and labeling products.

Flexography advantages and disadvantages

Advantage

• The cost of plates in flexographic printing is high, so they must be properly cared for to last for millions of prints.
• The time before setting up the printing process takes several hours
• A large amount of substrate is taken to set up the initial job, which can lead to wasted material
• If version changes are necessary, it will take a long time.

Disadvantages

• Works at very high print speeds
• Print on a wide variety of substrate materials
• The equipment is low cost and also its maintenance
• Costs are relatively low for consumables
• Ideal for high volume print requests
• It can handle all types of printing, varnishing, laminating and die cutting all in one pass

Flexography products

Flexo inks can be used on many types of permeable and waterproof materials. Flexography is very effective for printing continuous patterns such as wrapping paper and wallpaper.

Unlike the separate sheets of paper used in offset printing, flexo-handled media rolls allow high-volume orders to run seamlessly to reload the substrate.