Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

In a world filled with monochrome political signs, is there room for full color campaigning? And if not, why not?

I’ve been talking with a lot of you folks out there in webland lately about full color printing. I guess me and my cohorts have been making a big deal out of how inexpensive it can be to use full color in political campaign printing which, obviously, gets people wondering how we do it.

It’s no surprise you’re curious, folks! After all, you get used to printers telling you that their base price is for one color; two colors cost extra; you ask about three colors and you can almost see those little dollar signs roll up in their eyeballs.

Other printers will actually discourage use of multiple colors on political campaign printing because they say it makes the sign too busy, and voters don’t have the time or the energy to look at all those colors. According to these guys, you’d actually be doing the public a disservice if you used more than one or two colors.

But one and two-color printing isn’t always a clever design choice. Boring signs became the norm way back in the day because of the expense of full color printing, but the future is now, children! At Hotcards, all of our printing is full color – no extra cost. In fact, we’re the lowest cost full color printer in town, in the country, maybe even on the planet.

I interviewed Hotcards’ estimable boss-guy, Columbus Woodruff, to find out how we do it. Here’s what he had to say:

"The best analogy I can use is this: if you and your significant other decided to fly to the Bahamas and charter a plane for just the 2 of you, it would cost you $20,000 because you’re paying all the cost of the plane, the fuel, the pilot and the flight time by yourself. But that’s just crazy, for most people. Most people buy a ticket on a plane with 200 other passengers. It only costs $500 a ticket, because everyone is sharing the cost of the plane, fuel, crew, pilot and so on.

In this same way, we are able to save customers a ton of money on full color printing. What we do is gang many jobs together on a large sheet so everyone shares the cost of the paper, film, plates, ink, and labor. A normal commercial printer doesn’t do this. They print only your job on the sheet, which is like chartering your own plane – no big deal if money’s not a factor. If, on the other hand, you don’t have a limitless budget, gang run printing allows you to get high-quality, full color work done at a fraction of the cost."

Thanks, Columbus! It sounds like conventional commercial printing is fit for kings, but Hotcards gang run printing has a more democratic flavor to it. Everybody plays, everybody wins. Let the Emperor of Dubai charter his own plane.

For most printers, the addition of colors means the apparently painstaking addition of films, plates, extra runs, and extra clean-up, but because of the gang run nature of the Hotcards process, we’ve always got the full CMYK gamut happening. Long live democracy – where all colors are created equal.

At Hotcards, our philosophy is that you do the public a disservice with ugly, boring campaign advertising. Opening your mind to richer color schemes doesn’t have to mean some kind of crazy tie-dye hippie love-in type thing. You can just add a touch of gold to the traditional red, white, and blue, or black to add all kinds of shading possibilities to your existing red and blue scheme.

Even if you’re a traditionalist and you want to stick with two major colors, a whole array of different shades can be employed to add depth and excitement to your design. We’re seeing no shortage of this strategy in the ’08 campaign season.

Just promise me that whatever you do, you won’t decide on black and white as the sensible, understated answer to colorful signage. Republican frontrunner John McCain is giving it a try, and the result is not altogether engaging. In fact, the words "sinister," "ominous" and "vaguely futuro-militaristic" come to mind when I gaze into the shadowy depths of his campaign advertising. Did it just get cold in here? Brrr…

Alright, well, I hope this has given you a peek into the inner workings of Hotcards, and that you’re coming away with some sense of why there’s no reason for your campaign to go without full color printing. If you want to learn more about how to pick your sign or campaign colors, I believe we have a very useful article on the subject up here.