Personalising notebooks has become an increasingly popular trend for personalisation businesses, as well as gifts, and stationery enthusiasts. With the versatility of UV flatbed printers, adding unique designs to notebook covers is simple to do and opens up many creative opportunities.
This article will guide you step-by-step through the process of customising multiple A5 notebook covers with a UV printer, ensuring you achieve professional and precise results.
Equipment Used:
- 6 black A5 notebooks
- Adobe Illustrator
The Artwork
Checking colour gradient in Illustrator
1. We started by designing a logo to print onto our notebooks – something colourful, eye-catching, and professional. This was in keeping with the project's style and allowed us to print with gloss ink to produce special embossing and gloss effects. We settled on a logo and two different graphic options for an audio company.
2. We set up an A5-sized artboard in Adobe Illustrator, the size of the notebooks we were printing on, so the design would print at its measured size.
* We tend to use Adobe Illustrator to create design files but feel free to use whatever you are most comfortable with
3. As with other designs in this series, the logo was made of simple vector shapes and text, so it was easy to generate the white and gloss ink special effect layers. We added a white ink layer to one of our designs by loading Versaworks Spot Color Libraries in Illustrator and naming the layer RDG_WHITE so that the RIP could read the effect. We added a gloss layer to the design in much the same way, naming it RDG_GLOSS and colouring the areas appropriately.
4. While not essential, it is advisable to choke your white layer around the edges either in the design phase or using the RIP pre-print. This ensures that no white will show at the edges of the print.
Preparing the Printer
Loading blank notebooks onto the flatbed
1. We kept this process simple by creating a basic jig with masking tape. We marked a grid on the flatbed table that would show us where to place each A5 notebook with the tape. The tape was simply to mark where each item should go so it would be easy to match with our design file.
NB – We optimised the space on the flatbed as best we could for this project, which meant we positioned some notebooks in landscape and some in portrait.
2. We loaded the notebooks onto the flatbed, ensuring they were lined up carefully with the tape.
Printing onto the notebook covers
We used different design files – the logo would stay the same, but the graphic would be different – so we used Roland DG PrintAutoMate to help us automatically map our files to their related space on the flatbed. PrintAutoMate is particularly useful for printing high volumes of items.
1. We set up the jig layout in PrintAutoMate and saved it.
2. We loaded the notebook design into PrintAutoMate, which then automatically detected the file name, the number of units we wanted to print, and the object dimensions. We then clicked on autofill to populate the jig.
3. We clicked Print to send the job to Versaworks.
NB – While Roland machines are compatible with many popular RIPs, it’s usually best to use the software specifically designed for your device.
The touchscreen of the MO-240
4. We selected the correct jig from the list on the Settings screen of our printer, pressed Print and waited for the print to be completed.
Conclusion
The colourful logo and graphics on the soft black notebook covers looked great when they had finished printing. We used multiple layers of gloss ink to emboss the logo and lettering that added to both the tactile effect and impression of quality. This print project was quick, effective and scalable if we chose to produce more of the same.
The basic jig was enough to help with speed and accuracy but was very simple to produce.
If you’d like more information on anything mentioned in this article, please contact us to speak to a UV Printing expert.