Chip Label Crisis - Please Help!

[lopat08865]

2 weeks away from the one and only once-a-year game I bought 500 Texas Hold Em chips for, and I'm just now getting around to doing my custom labels.

My designs are 99% done and look SWEET when printed to photo gloss paper on my inkjet. I've printed circle templates on blank 8.5x11 paper and believe my inkjet can "hold" position to acceptable tolerance. I'm ready!

BUT ... am I crazy thinking I should do this myself?

Has anybody DIY'd the 63/page labels on an INKJET (not laser) printer? How long does it take to print a page? How many ink cartridges did you use? How did your printer hold up? How much waste did you encounter? Did you use the gloss, vinyl, or weatherproof? Do all 3 of them "look" the same? Would you do it again?

Any and all advice appreciated!!! I gotta get my order for label stock and ink cartridges in ASAP.


Thanks

Bob

PS: I'm using Quark for layout, importing Photoshop created TIFFs into the 1" labels. I've allowed .1" bleed and .1" clear inside the label.

[lwestatbus]

Yes, you're crazy. But that shouldn't stop you.

Man, I can tell you everything you want to know, but only for a Laser Printer. In particular I can't tell you how ink jet inks will hold up on different label stocks.

Here's what I do know that is relevant.

1. The onlinelabels.com weatherproof labels do not come loose when wet. I even soaked them overnight in both water and beer to test. The surface of these labels for laser printers is pretty glossy like photo paper but I've never used the inkjet version.

2. Use Krylon spray over your printed sheets (before applying the labels). This will do a LOT to protect your printing. Again, using Krylon coated weatherproof labels (done with color laser) the ink didn't scratch or smudge after being soaked overnight. You can get Krylon at craft stores. Wal Mart may even carry it. I used matte as I wanted to subdue the labels (or not brighten them) as the chips were dull in finish.

3. Paper handling consistency CAN be a big problem. I finally ended up buying my own laser printer when the one to which I had access was causing me to waste 2/3 of the sheets because of variability in the paper path. It was a high volume commercial printer that had just been used too long AND had a long paper path. The one I bought was brand new and had a very short straight-through paper path option. I had similar configuration to yours with 1.1" square images superimposed on a 1" label. Anything you can do to straighten out the paper path will help.

4. On paper handling: I ended up feeding the label sheets in one at a time to ensure that each sheet started at the same point. I could still send multiple copies to the printer but would only load one page in the manual feed tray, let it print, load the next page, ... When I tried to stack multiple sheets I encountered more misalignment on either printer.

5. Your label design can highlight or mute alignment problems. Look at my design here: http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/forum/t11708/rpt-label-designs-round-2-opinions-please. The curved text follows the label shape but really highlighted when the sheet was misaligned. Displacement from top to bottom wasn't too bad as long as the text wasn't kissing the edge of the label but even 0.03" or so of offset left to right was noticable and enough to discard the sheet.

6. I'd test your printer alignment consistency. Just put some stuff in different places around the page and print the page and then feed it through again, maybe two or three times, and see how much variation there is. If you've got something of similar weight to your label stock that of course would be better.

7. Overorder your label stock. If you have low waste you can expand your set later or make labels for friends, but you don't want to be stuck short with the game starting in an hour.

I've promised the forum a complete post on my experience as I learned a lot. I ended up with 1,500 RPT NexGens with five different label designs. I am VERY happy with them now but man was it a mess.

I also did a smaller set of the 11.5g Texas Holdem chips for my daughter. They also take a 1" label nicely.

Good luck.

[kbuschhorn]

Larry,

Just curious, what software and template did you use to print the labels? I'm wondering if I could create label and then bring it to a Kinko's or some other professioinal printer and have them print them on their state of the art printers???

Thanks!

Ken

[PocketRocket]

Read Larry's #3 about using community high usage printers. :D

One other thing you might want to consider is to have one of the pros that print labels do them for you. Though I don't know of any who are currently printing on anything but paper labels.

On the other hand with all the learning that Larry has gone through over the past couple of months, he might be ready to go commercial :D

Hey Larry, just found out that a couple of the more widely known people on the web who print labels uses the same printer that you bought.

Larry,

Just curious, what software and template did you use to print the labels? I'm wondering if I could create label and then bring it to a Kinko's or some other professioinal printer and have them print them on their state of the art printers???

Thanks!

Ken

[lwestatbus]

Ken,

I developed a table layout in Microsoft Word which I will be happy to send you. I don't have it with me here at the office but will try to remember to make it available. Maybe best thing for me to do is upload it to a web server I have and put a link here. I'll try to remember to do that this evening but if I forget it won't be until Sunday evening as I'll be gone.

I used Photoshop to prepare the images and Illustrator to create the curved text. I have slightly older versions and Photoshop didn't do curved text. I understand that the current version will but don't know for sure. I used 1.1 x 1.1 inch images. BTW: When I exported the Illustrator images to JPEGs or TIFFs Illustrator added a 10% white buffer around my 1.1" square image. When I originally added these images to my Word template they were offset and I couldn't figure out why. Finally went into Word's image properties and saw from the size what the problem was. I used the neat little image managing utility that comes with Office 2003 to do the cropping. So all in all I had four different software products involved. Unbelievable.

I had planned on using Kinkos when the original printer I had access to didn't work out. I'd gone in and talked over the project with one of the clerks. They had a color laser printer in the pay-by-the-hour computer area but absolutely refuse to let you use anything but paper or stock that they supply. The clerk said that their big production laser printer could handle my stock but they would have to set up the job and there would be a charge, but it wasn't going to be much and they had software to do that really easily. I prepared all of my graphics files and brought them in but the manager told me that they wouldn't run my label stock unless I had a certificate from the label manufacturer about the heat tolerance of the stock and that he'd never heard of this set-up software that the other guy had mentioned. He insisted on using a Word Avery template which won't work because it has little filler table cells that don't allow for bleed beyond the 1" area of the label. By this time I was so frustrated that I did the only rational thing remaining which was to go out and buy my own printer. I've promised PocketRocket that I'd post a complete overview of my experience but haven't gotten around to it yet.

If you have access to a color printer for final production plan on having to tweak the margins and possibly even the column widths and row heights before you go into final production. Before I bought my own printer I'd test setup on a B/W laser printer and then take the files to the color printer location. They never aligned the same. I was usually able to fix the problem with just margin tweaking but also with width/height modifications. I found that between Word and the different printers you don't have an infinitely variable size setting available. For example, you'll see on my template that some rows have the cell contents centered but some have them high or low across the row as that was the only way to achieve the correct placement since the row height couldn't be set to exactly where I wanted it.

[lwestatbus]

Here's the table layout. It was set up for the 1" labels from onlinelabels.com.

http://www.lwest.net/poker/westlabellayout.doc.

[PocketRocket]

Don't feel compelled to post it for me, I already know how to print labels . I went through a bit of a learning curve myself and was glad to share it with someone else.

But the tremendous efforts that you undertook to learn the process was something that I thought would be beneficial to share with others who might be interested in learning. Since I've forgotten a lot of the obstacles that I encountered (happens a lot at our age, I guess :D )

I've promised PocketRocket that I'd post a complete overview of my experience but haven't gotten around to it yet.

[kbuschhorn]

Thanks! I'll give it a try and see what I can come up with. There is a color laser printer at work I was planning to use!

I'm glad you mentioned Kinko's because I was thinking of doing the same thing! Guess that saves me some time there!