IMAGESMITH has been hard at work here in western North Carolina providing print and marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses for 40 years. We are happy to have been nominated as a Top NC Printing Company by The Startup Pill for our innovation and expertise in navigating a quickly changing marketing landscape. You can check out the rest of this list of great Tarheel print innovators here.
We love print, and the expanding and powerful role it plays in today’s ever-changing marketing mix. Still, the term “printer” can sound misleading. Today, printers do far more than put ink on paper. We have become media communications specialists for business owners and marketers, and we are your closest and most knowledgeable sources for consulting on your overall marketing strategy. A good printer will understand your budget, your marketing goals, and be able to suggest many strategies for creating results: integrated marketing strategies, direct mail, targeted variable data printing, promotional products, signage, branding, website development and e-commerce, social media marketing techniques, and unique design ideas. Discuss with them your target audience, your brand goals, who your consumer is, what your mission, budget, and specific goals are for the year. Together, we can develop and recommend specific marketing strategies that you can use to translate into profit and customer recognition of your brand and your work. The bottom line: why drain your energy trying to learn the new world of marketing on TOP of running your business when you already have a marketing consultant waiting to talk with you?
Seeing something enlarged to a great size can reveal unseen tiny flaws – think of that bad selfie in harsh lighting. But by the same token, greatly reducing an image can create it’s own problems with recognition and readability. That’s where 
Great typography is a pleasure to read. But the requirements for that readability change with a font’s size. Today the need for easy-to-read small or “micro” type sizes is increasing in both print and digital applications. Why now more than before? E-books, smart watches, phones, and other devices with small screens require fonts with quick readability at a small size and resolution. On the print side, prescription bottles with dosage directions, food packaging with nutritional info, and almost all product packaging that includes ingredients or warnings need a readable font at small point sizes to clearly impart information.
In general, most fonts were designed for the average reading environment – as in comfortably reading a book or newspaper – in the 8 point to 14 point range, and for a viewer with 20/20 vision. Being 
One great example is 
Planning a strategy to your market outreach, rather than just looking from event to event, is a game-changer for small and medium sized businesses. Just as a restaurant might develop different menus for lunch, dinner, take-out, or catering, you can create a series of flyers that 
The flyer does not have to just be a boring sheet of paper. Consider 
Defining a “spot blue” in your work does not mean you must always print offset, using the spot ink. Still, it gives your printer a marker of what you intend that blue to be at output. Now here comes the next hurdle – you will need to take into account the color shift that will happen when printing a PMS-defined color in CMYK. Again, we can thank the differences in color gamuts for that. For many colors, the shift is slight – for others it can be significant. Designers and printers should be able to show you both color swatches of the PMS color you chose, and of any color shift that will occur from switching to the CMYK equivalent of that color.
Cold Foil Transfer is accomplished on a 6-color press. The first 2 units apply adhesive and foil, the other 4 are for CMYK printing. Overprinting CMYK onto the foil creates a whole gamut of metallic colors that would not be possible with one-color hot foil stamping. Besides gold, silver, and copper foil, there are also holographic foils which reflect a broad spectrum of colors back to the eye, as well as matte, gloss, pearled and pigmented foils from which to choose. Again, this can be a costly process, is often limited to coated stock only, and is not a great fit for a short-run budget.
