Hi my name is John Fischer and I’m the owner and founder of Stickergiant and today I want to tell you about spot color printing versus four color process printing.

We’re gonna start with spot color printing first, by far the most popular type of sticker we print is spot color printing - probably 80-90% of our stickers are spot color. There are some advantages:spot color stickers last longer and are less expensive. This is an example of a one color sticker black on a white sticker substrate for Zombie Compact Claw.

This is an example for Gold’s Gym of a two color sticker black and yellow. Very durable very inexpensive with a standard circle shape. Here’s an example of a four spot color sticker, not four color process, but four spot colors. Yellow, red, black and blue colors in this sticker. They’re all separate and none of the colors are combined to create other colors. That’s one of the characteristics of spot color printing, we don’t blend the colors together very often to make other colors. This is a fantastic high end four spot color sticker. It’s die cut on a removable white vinyl. It’s got four special colors. A fantastic sticker. This sticker is a very long lasting sticker for my friends at Tech Cocktail - Frank Ruber, Eric Olsen great guys, make a great drink.

So that is Spot color printing. The advantages are it’s less expensive. It’s longer lasting, that ink when we print spot color we can print silk screen so the ink is thicker on the substrate so it’s gonna lasts longer in the intense sulight.

The other kind of printing we do, and we do it really well, is four color process printing. Four color process uses the same four inks always: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. THose four colors - Cyan, basically a light blue, Magenta, a dark red, yellow and black. Those are combined together to make thousands of colors. This is an illustration of my friend Dave Taylor, he does online tech support, an excellent resource. Four colors, four color process, combined to make thousands of colors.

This is a four color process that I really like. Carson Fireking. Again, four color process, cyan magentna yellow and black are combined to make thousands of color combinations. This particular sticker is for Carson Fireking, they customize helicopters. In fact President elect Obama flies on a customized Carson customized helicopter. This is another example of four color process, Stop the Social Media Voodoo. Thousands of color combinations in this sticker but only four colors were used. And here is a nice cancer survivor sticker with a happy line on it from pennington health center, our customers, cancer center.

So that’s the main advantage, four color process is really cool, gives you the ability to have thousands of colors when you’re only using four colors so you can have delicate vingettes and blends and photo realistic pritning. The big disadvantage to four color process is it’s expensive and doesn’t last as long. The inks are put down in a very controlled and thin fashion so we can combine them and get predictable results, but that also means the inks are thinner and they’re not going to last as long in the sun and the weather and that kind of thing. THe substrates for four color process stickers are not as durable as well. They’re thinner, not as heavy duty because they have to run in a certain kind of environment that doesn’t lend itself to really thick substrates.

So the advantages of spot color printing are they’re cheaper and longer lasting. Most stickers you see are spot color printed. The disadvantages are less color combinations available and you can’t get delicate blends and vignettes that you can get in four color process. Four color process the advantages are the felxibility in colors you can achieve, photo realistic printing. Disadvanatges are it’s much more expensive and doesn’t last as long. So that’s four color versus spot color. I’m John Fischer and thanks for watching.