Once a Major Let-Down and Magazine Printing Nightmare; PrintPlace.com Has Come to Surprise Me
My husband and I own a marketing and design business where we print many large orders as resellers with several online printing companies; we also own and publish a local magazine in the city where we live. When seeking out a print vendor with good magazine printing prices for resellers, we chose Print Place to print our monthly magazine. We found that the price was pretty much unbeatable for the options we needed in press run.

To start, our first run of several thousand booklets looked great. The colors were sharp, the trim was darn-near perfect and overall we were very happy with the appearance of our magazine. We printed on a 3-day turn-around which meant our cost was a bit higher than had we been able to choose a 5-day turn-around option. We used their ground [...] Continue Reading...

With the Cuisinart Supreme Grind Automatic Burr Mill I feel like a Barista!
Many moons ago I worked at a quaint little coffeehouse as a barista. I still remember using the commercial burr mill each morning to grind the different types of beans for the many boutique blends of coffee we served each day. This Cuisinart grinder comes pretty close to the grind quality that you used to only be able to get via commercial grinders.

Today I am a little less picky and lot more cheap...

So I like to buy whole bean coffee in bulk at Costco. I generally store the beans in a large canister that has an airtight seal to keep the beans fresh as long as possible. The Cuisinart burr mill grinder has a storage area at the top that will hold around a half pound of beans, however don't hope for the worlds freshest cup [...] Continue Reading...

Face it, proofing sucks. Proof-it-Online attempts to make the proofing process suck.... less. After 2 years of using this proof system, here is my review:
Just to give you some history here, my husband and I publish our own magazine and are also independent graphic artists. With these two lines of work comes the very real need to tame the proofing process. One of the biggest challenges, especially as a magazine publisher has been to keep track of hundreds of proofs under tight deadlines.

In the past we've used everything from FTP'ing PDFs to emailing each client individually with a PDF attachment of their ad. Each approach had its benefits and drawbacks. With FTP I was able to quickly batch upload PDFs, but still had to have an assistant email each and every client with a link to the PDF or I would have frustrated clients wading through 100+ PDFs to [...] Continue Reading...