Printing Cheap Calendars in this Economy

Let us face it. The economy is just not what it was in the past. If you are printing calendars for marketing or for direct selling, you will probably struggling to find the initial investment money or project money just to start this thing properly. So let me help you by giving you the important tips about printingn this sluggish economy. Here are the easy to follow steps that you can do to reduce that calendar printing costs significantly.

1. Take your own pictures – Photographers or actual professional photographs can be expensive of course when you factor them in professional calendar printing. The best way to actually curve this additional cost is to just take your own pictures.

I am sure that you have a few friends who have a decently good digital camera out there. Also, if you are into calendar printing, you already should have an eye and some creativity for the best kinds of calendar photographs. So basically you can just have all those photographs for free by taking your own creative pictures.

The good thing about digital photography is that you do not really waste too much as you take pictures. Just take a lot of your own artistic shots of your concept and you are bound to get a few great ones that you can use for calendar printing, all for free.

2. Create your own graphics – If you can create your own pictures, you can also create your own style graphics in calendar printing. You do not have to rely on an expensive layout artist for the job. With great user friendly design software and online tutorials, it is easy, even for amateurs to have great graphics developed in no time at all. So cut more costs to your calendar design and printing by doing your own graphics.

3. Design the with free resources – Did you know that there are many free design resources for your calendars and other kinds of prints out there. In fact, there are TONS actually online and you should exploit them to reduce your calendar printing costs even further. Here are just some of the free resources that you should watch out for.

a. Free pictures – There are tons of free images galleries that allow images to be used in commercial print works. Just do a search engine query on them. Flickr and Morguefile though are good options.

b. Free fonts – A free fonts search in Google should give you tons of sites where you can download fonts for free.

c. Free templates – Need templates? Go to calendar printing companies. They offer free calendar templates in different sizes.

d. Free software – Search for open source design software and you will get tons of useful free applications that you can try out. OpenOffice, Gimp and Inkscape are just a few of the design applications you should watch out for.

4. Use limited colors for key areas – You can also reduce the main costs of calendar printing by using limited colors on key areas. Instead of full color printing on all your calendar pages, you can opt for only black ink printing in key text heavy pages. With this it is possible only to pay full color printing for the 12 main pages of your calendars and then save 50% on the rest of the pages. Try to negotiate this with your printer and see the savings.

5. Manage the material qualities – Finally, you should of course manage the material quality in your calendar printing if you want cheaper costs. The best way to do this is to be a bit practical with your paper and your binding. You do not need to use expensive imported materials. Go for classic paper materials with aqueous coatings, medium weight paper and ring binding. This is a good classic configuration that is not too expensive and good enough for commercial calendars.

So that is how you print cheap and decent color calendars in this economy. Apply these techniques on your own calendars today.