How to Print Envelopes | Printing Invitation Envelopes

1. Intro: Hi, everyone. I'm lady from Desire, Miley Neat. I'm an invitation designer and business strategist for Creative Entrepreneurs, and I'm so excited you're here for this envelope printing course. This course will teach you how to print envelopes in house, which Brenner's will use wink, wink and special skills like white in printing, printing envelopes with a bleed and, of course, printing on tiny little artist repeat envelopes. It's a moderate level course, which does require some familiarity with invitation design. Adobe in Design and Adobe Illustrator, as those of the programs will be working in your class. Project will be, of course, to print some of your own envelopes and upload them to the class projects for feedback. And so everyone can see your beautiful designs. You can check out a bunch of stationary specific resource is and our resource shot at design maya lini dot com, including guides on how to assemble wedding invitations, how to design wedding invitations and all of our favorite print and paper vendors, including envelope vendors, of course, and something that I have not announced. This is my official announcement, for this is a new course coming out called power in pricing. It's going to be a course dedicated to pricing for invitation and stationery designers on Lee, and it's gonna be such an amazing resource for you. This is the question that people have been asking you to teach for years, and it's never felt right until this moment. So power in pricing. It's still in the works. But you can go ahead and get on the weightless if you want more information, which is going to be in your class description and in your costs. Notes. Pdf downloads. So click that link. Get on the wait list. Also knew more information as I developed the courses faras What's coming in it, what's included and, of course, how you can take advantage of this awesome resource. And we got a ton of free resources that are available on our blawg and on our YouTube channel so you can search, designed by Lainey or designed by lini dot com. So let's get started with envelope printing with you 2. Pros + Cons of Envelope Printing: So, first of all, we want to talk about pros and cons of envelope printing in house and why you may or may not want to undertake this test, cause it can be a little challenging. Inflow Printing is kind of a weird beast, because it depends a lot on the equipment and the specific envelopes and even the design that you're trying to print. While there are a lot of commercial printers that handle stationary, there's not actually a ton handle envelopes. Only a small percentage of those commercial printers will actually take on envelopes, and even then it might be, you know, only certain sizes or certain types of designs. You can find all of our favorite vendors and are printing paper Vendor Guide, which is gonna be linked in the description below this course. So one of the main reasons that I do envelope printing and how sometimes is just that outsourcing can be really difficult. Um, for instance, I don't know of any single commercial printer that prints an envelope with a bleed on it at all, but you can do that in house. Also, most commercial printers don't print on four bar RCP size envelopes which is a really common size for me. So I have to take on a lot of that in house just because there aren't that many options available. Some of the best options who do all of these things can take up to two weeks, which is really stressful on my production timeline. Whereas I could just prince mm blows in a day or two. Well, I am a firm believer and outsourcing every chance you get. And I'm willing Teoh pay a lot of money to not have to deal with things like this envelope printing of something that's just kind of tough to outsource because the vendors, they're just not as readily available as you kind of think they should be. So that's the main reason that I have taken on envelope printing in house. I don't say this to deter you from trying it out. I just say it to set the right expectation. OutFront Envelope printing takes a lot of time trial and error troubleshooting and especially patients as of any type of printing. If you ever dealt with a printer, you probably know what I'm talking about, so you just wanna have that expectation up front. If you are looking outsource, definitely check out the printing paper vendor dried because that's gonna show you all of our favorite M below printing vendors. And if you do still want to go on this journey with me, then I think you'll still love this course and all of the possibilities that come with envelope printing and all the fun designs you can check out the hash hide no more boring envelopes on instagram, which has a ton of inspiration. And I actually have a whole course on skill share. A swell about creating beautiful, unique envelope designed so you can check that out linked in the description as well. The biggest piece of advice I can offer you is just to start out simple. And don't go too complex until your super duper comfortable with your equipment and how it prints. So while we're gonna discuss things like over the flat prints, bleed printing, white, printing all kinds of things in this course, I urge you to just start really simple with simple designs that you can handle and don't send any designs to your client unless you've tested it out first and know that they can be produced 150 times because some hands will send something that seems like it should be an option. And when you actually get into doing it, it's a lot more difficult than you think. So we're going to start by chatting about the equipment that you might have. 3. Types of Printers: I won't discuss different types of printers, and there's two main types of printers that you'll get your hands on, which is the jet and laser in jet operates in kind of what you probably think about as far as a printer. It literally spews IK across the page in a certain design to create the peace that you told it to create. Basically like paying or eight pins or any other traditional application of ink to paper. Laser printers, on the other hand, behave differently. They actually melt or fused toner powder onto a piece of paper. In the design that you've told it to print in a laser printer, the paper actually goes physically around a heated drum, which is very pivotal. The process and provide some frozen console talk. About a second in jet printers are more common as your household printer. They are cheaper. They're Inc is super, and they are typically smaller. They run at room temperature, and because they used ink, they don't print as well on slick materials like metallic envelopes or clear film. Depending on the type of ink, some inkjet printers are more likely to smudge the laser printers and maybe more time for it to drop. These of paper could come out of an inkjet printer feeling wet. You've probably known stop before, but it would never come out of a laser printer. Feeling wet like that in Japanese at the smaller home level can typically handle colors better and a wider array. So they're gonna be better for things like watercolor printing or designs with lots of very specific colors. A lot of India printers also feed the paper directly through the printer, as opposed to turning it around a drum. And for this reason, they can typically handle thicker papers than a laser printer can. All right laser printers. Laser printers are typically more expensive. The toner to replace it is a lot more expensive, but if you break it down by cost per page because of the amount of toner they use in the amount that's in each cartridge, it can actually be cheaper than any jet printer. Or at least comparable. Laser printers made print a little bit more crisp, um, and clearly than interpreters, which makes them ideal for a text and documents. Specifically, black ink I find is a lot better on a laser printer than any jet burner. They also typically work faster than any jet printer on day use heat to actually melt the toner. So when it goes around the drum, your paper can actually come out a little bit curled and warm. Sometimes there are limitations to running a piece of paper through a laser printer multiple times because the toner of the second print can react strangely with the toner that's still there from the first print. So you want to make sure you're only write three laser printer one time or outsourcing to a more complex laser printer. Something like this one that we have here. Can Onley handle? Being run through one time without getting a little wonky? Also should never run envelopes open flap through laser printer. If they haven't Hughes it on the flat, you he's It can actually melt and get stuck inside the printer and kind of gunk it up, which means really expensive to fix or even ruin your printer. In fact, laser printers are typically more sensitive on the inside Teoh dust light all kinds of things that can go on inside. So you want to keep your laser printer a lot cleaner, whereas I don't have the same issues with my inkjet printer. All right, so which is better when you're printing envelopes? The answer, of course, as with everything is that it depends on the use case that you're going for. I actually have one laser printer and one inkjet printer. You can't see it right now, Um, and they serve completely different purposes. If I had to choose one, I'd probably choose my laser because it prints faster. And I think it's got crisper lines, which I do like. However, it does have some limitations. If you need a print on metallic envelopes, then you'll need a laser printer. It's the only one that will print well on metallic envelopes. If you're printing a lot of open flock designs, then you'll want an each eh printer because you can't print open flat on the laser and also recommend inkjet for colorful designs like watercolor as it's gonna handle it better. Most commercial printers have laser printers, so if you're looking for something that can kinda make up for anything, that you're not able to outsource than an inkjet is probably gonna give you more capabilities, and you can still outsource some things that you need printed on a laser. Now, much out about our specific equipment and what that means for you. 4. Equipment Conversation: all right. The question I get more than any other question is what printer do you use? The truth is that I try to outsource as much as possible when it comes to my business, because I prefer to spend time doing the things that I love most and that really, like ignite my passion and set me on fire those kind of things. So you know that costs a little bit more. I can typically make up the cost difference from outsourcing something in the time that would take me to trouble true. Learn an entirely new skill, like printing or something like that, um, and figure out all the little kinks that are associated with it. Frankly, I also do not have space in my tiny little office for massive printing equipment, So I've got to be limited and smart about what I take on. However, Ebola printing is totally unique, and it's the one thing that we really do print and handle in house pretty regularly. This is mostly just used to the fact that a lot of professional print shops don't handle envelope printing, and those that do don't always handle it very well. So what friend Or do I use I used to. The first is an ink shot and it's a cannon. Picks MMA Pro 100. Her name is Wanda, and the second is this right here is a laser printer, specifically an h p m 4 52 D w very complicated. And his name is Cosmo. So Wander was not named for the fairly odd parents. But then when I got Cosmo, I just felt like I had to go with the whole wanna Cosmo thing. So it's stuck the cannon jet I mostly used for open, flat printing or if I want to print return and guests addresses at the same time. I also use it for him, e paper and vellum. But this course is really about envelopes. All stick to that. I use HP laser for close about printing black printing as it's gonna be a lot crisper and any designs that are on the flat side of the envelope only. I don't really print metallic envelopes too much, but if I did, that would be cosmos drop as well, and I always use the HP for four bar and below printing if I can. Now here is the thing about all of this, you can absolutely have success printing envelopes with a ton of different partners. However, I can Onley really instruct you on the equipment that I use and that I'm familiar with. So the settings that you're going to see throughout this course are going to vary from what you see on your screen. If you have different equipment, the capabilities that each printer has are gonna be slightly different as well. Animal. Very whether you're using a PC or Mac, I'm using PC. By the way, just so you know, this is why this course is here on skill share on. I didn't order a high price point for it because I wanted to be accessible to everyone who can glean a little bit of value from some of the lessons but may not be able to use the exact same settings that I use because you may have different equipment than I do. So I really hope that you contain this course and enjoy it and learn from it, even if you do not have the same two printers and I honestly believe that you can. But I also will not be able to troubleshoot from different printers or different equipment . So if you have a Mac or if you have different printers and you're having some issues after watching this course, I recommend getting on the phone with your equipment manufacturers as they're gonna be your best resource. There's also gonna be different settings and capabilities, depending on what program you're printing from. Can you see how this is very difficult Already? I'm gonna be showing you from my two most common programmes, which is Adobe in design in Adobe Illustrator. If you're pretty more from PDFs or other programs besides that, then you might see different settings as options as well. So I'm not saying any of this to be a negative. Nancy. You feel like it started out this course pretty negative, but I don't want to deter you. I just want to let you know why this is so complicated and why so many designers have a hard time getting it right, because it varies depending on every single circumstances. Urine. And yes, of course, it varies on the type of unf loops that you use. So we're gonna talk about that next 5. Envelopes: as if envelope printing was not complicated enough already. It can also very based on the type of envelopes that you eat a source. Paper types go. Anything center and smoother will give better results and help your printers out a little bit. So, as an invitation designer, I always gravitate towards stick texture, luxurious feeling envelopes. But if you're printing in house, those things will actually cause you more stress. That's not to say that we don't print on them anyway. There are some things you have to know in order to do that successfully, as even our Fenice of stock envelopes are pushing the limits of what kind of a household small, non commercial printer can handle. Well, if you really want a super stick card stock really texture luxuries envelope. I recommend printing on them and then having them converted, die cut and folded after U print on them. For the best results. We typically use about £91 envelopes, which is what our main supplier typically stocks. Every paper is slightly different, but that's kind of a good starting point. Will link that name supplier for you below, and you can access all of our favorite print paper and envelope vendors and are printed paper vendor dried again, linked below for you. One thing that will happen, in fact, is the flat shapes. So you can go with the square flat, a deep view flap any where in between, and that won't really have too much in effect on how you printer envelopes. One thing that will have a large effect on this process is the size of the envelope. Most printers can't handle anything smaller than 45 inches, so R S V, P envelopes or four of our size envelopes are gonna fall below that level and the extra difficult to print. It doesn't mean that we're not workarounds, which we'll discuss in our course, of course, but it does mean that you'll have to pay special attention to those envelopes, and you might be better off printing on larger sizes. Make sure you check the general guidelines for your printer before you purchased just to see if they could handle those sides as well or not in our last point here is that you should always order plenty of extra envelopes if you're printing in house. If you outsource this, they are going through extras. I promise you one of the questions I got in preparation for this course waas how to avoid wasting so Maney trial friends. And the truth is that there's not really a way to do this. I'm gonna show you some ways in our course how to cut down on this a little bit. But there's always gonna be a little bit of trial and error. I order about 15% extra. And if I'm putting on small envelopes like the four bars that we mentioned, I always order at least 20 to 25 extra. Sometimes this is way more than we need, and sometimes we need every last one because your printers could be a little temperamental sometimes. And just in case you didn't watch the intro, we have announced our new course called Power in Pricing, which is a pricing course specifically for stationary designers. Where we talk about how we account for all those extra envelopes that were ordering and the time that we spend printing those envelopes in house on and how you make sure to charge your clients enough to cover all of the little things that are included in that so make sure you check out the link in your class notes to get on the weightless for power in pricing, which will be coming out later this year. 6. Designs that Work Well: I recommend keeping things simple. As you start out in the world of envelope printing, you officially can dio pretty much anything you want. But some designs are going to cause more issues than others to start. I want to clarify that this is the front of the envelope in this part, with the flap is considered the best. That's the terminology will be using for this course. Designs that go from the front over the flap onto the back are actually pretty simple to pull off. If you haven't inkjet printer something that entirely on the back with the flat printed can be a little bit more difficult. For the record, he should never designed something that does. Both of these things goes from the front over the flap and then also continues over the flat onto the back of the envelope. This will be almost impossible for yourself or any commercial printer to print, because you have to run to separate runs and line them up absolutely perfectly over the flat. So if you're going to do something on both sides, just separate those designs. You could do something like this and then do something totally different on the back, but as long as they don't connect, you'll be fine. I try to avoid putting super straight lines and Sarah fonts really close to the edge of the envelope. Home printers can have a tendency apparent. The tiny is big crooked, no matter what you do. But also envelopes themselves are not always straight. Sometimes we'll print something that measures to be a perfect straight line, but it looks a little crooked to the I because the envelope fold is not actually straight. So if you keep the straight lines away from the edges of the envelope, then it helps with the visual effect that your lines air so straight and not crooked. Just something as simple as adding a little design element. That's not a perfect line, or I love to do this round return address, which also helps it not be confused with the main address on the back and go to the return address instead of the main address. Any sort of individual elements on the front of the envelope like this you little bony sketch are completely fine and actually pretty easy to pull off. Make sure you check out our school share course on creating unique envelopes for better guidelines on where you should place those designs to avoid any postal issues that pretty much anything goes here, got little flower there, it's, and even all these little squares is actually not a super difficult print. I would steer clear of any design that physically bleeds off the edge when you first start out, or even or even off the edge of the flap like this. We will cover those in the envelope printing course, though the simplest thing to start out with is just your name and address. But you can always play with fonts and sizes and layouts to make that still interesting and unique. Now let you cover a little bit about the designs that work well, I'll show you how to set up your file. 7. Setting up Files: when I collected questions for this course, a few of you asked about date emerging actually already have a course on this on YouTube for free. So please check that out. It's linked below. The quick answer to your main question was, No, I definitely do not type each individual address by itself, especially when it comes to something like this. We've got different fonts. We've gotta Tallix. We've got something spaced out differently that would take forever. So I do use the data, merge tool in in design in conduction with Google Sheets or Excel to get a document that looks like this. See how it's got every address formatted in the same way on each page. But how do you set this whole document up correctly, toe Actually print out for you down your data. Merge. We'll cover that now. First, you'll want to ask yourself if you're putting open flat or close laugh, I print open flat. If I'm using my inkjet printer. Only I friend Open flap. If I want to design, that goes onto the flap from the front to the back. I also print open flat if I want to prevent that. If I want to print my return and guest address in one go. Alternatively, I print close slab if I'm Onley printing the return address if I'm printing on my laser printer or if I'm printing something that believes off of the flat onto the back of the envelope. If you're simply setting out files to send to a printer, ask them which way they like things to go. That's we'll need to measure or envelope size and a seven envelope close is five and 1/4 by seven and 1/4 inches the size of Annie Simon. Envelope Open will depend on the manufacturer about on blue and the flat shape as you would be. I was even see their three differences between the overall size, depending on the flat shape and the manufacturer. I measure this one any measure from the bottom all the way to the tip, and I'm gonna get about 9.75 This is my favorite manufacturer, who I have linked in your notes for you. So we'll keep nine and 3/4 as our measurement when we get onto the computer. Now that we have that measurement will create our pages in in design If you're putting a single design for return addresses, for instance, then will typically go directly from illustrator just because that's where I design all of my pieces. Initially, when printing variable addresses I always used in design due to that simple date emerge feature, can you print variable addresses from illustrator? Yeah, but it is much harder. So I just picked in design. So we'll open up in design and will create a new document with one page That's the total size of your open envelope. Remember, in this case that waas 7.25 by 9.75 inches, I actually saved my typical sizes into documents and named, You know, whatever manufacturer the envelope is from and size, so I don't have to measure it every time. None of these other settings really matter too much, so I just leave them as is. If you prefer something different, then go for it. Your document is pretty much ready to go, so it's time to add in your data merge that that he was linked below. So check it out. When you have time as a reminder, you can add static elements like we have just copied in this random. Okay, Here, Um, and the return address. You can do that on the date emerge. Or you could do it via master pages, which is actually what I recommend. So you going here and you add it to your a master, Then you come down and it's no on every single page. We also double return addresses on some of them because that's not how he did it. The benefit of this is if you need to edit something. For instance, if we decided we didn't like this bouquet facing this way and we wanted to change the way that it was facing, it'll taint on every single page. Now, a lot of the time when you're doing addresses, you have to do some formatting like I had to go in here and separate these names on the two lines because they were too long to be on one line together. So if I've gone ahead and done that for 100 50 pages, then I don't want to have to go through and actually rotate this little flower on every single page as well. So I can just do anything that static via the massive age section, and then whatever I decided to dio, maybe I'll make it a little smaller, goes ahead and applies on every single page, so you can see that, and then you don't have to go back and reform at all of your address strangers that you've made. So at this point, in theory, we've got a file that's totally ready to print. Of course, this one has a weird flower on it and double addresses on most pages. So we'll go there and delete that. But otherwise everything is ready to go. It's all the right size and laid out for printing as an example of close lap printing and printing from Illustrator. Here is this file that will print over the flat to fill the back of the envelope. A little return address is right here. We measure our board based on the clothes envelope, which is seven and 1/4 by five and 1/4 and set this up as if we're putting on a regular old piece of paper that size. Nothing more needs to be done at this point, so next time I'll take you through the print settings that we need for each of our printers . 8. Print Settings Inkjet: all right, since we're putting on our inject right now with a flat open our page eyes is set to seven and 1/4 by 9.75 This is the size of the envelope of the flat open. So we go to file print, we'll get the regular dialogue box for Adobe in design. And there's not a lot we need to do here for your first print samples, you should select to print just one page instead of sending all of the pieces in your file to print. I'm gonna select my Canon Pro 100 series. This is where I'm actually gonna get the settings that I need. The only thing we need to make sure of is that in the set up tab, the size as defined by driver this means of the size of the paper in the printer is gonna be what we said it too. In the settings of the printer not actually here in this dialog box. Before we get to those printer settings, I just want to remind you that you can save presets of settings that will carry over from job to job. Thes will carry over printer settings and in design settings. So you can see that I've got a few up here based on the manufacturer flap shaped, flat, closed, flat, open size of the envelope, etcetera. So how do we get to those better printer settings were gonna click set up in the bottom corner and then we'll click preferences right here. This is the box that looks different depending on which printer drivers you have installed and which printer you select. This is also where we make pretty much all of our changes. This is the key here. I'll sort of the top. These four settings are just like different presets of customization, of all the features below. So you can save a new one if you like, once you get the settings down for printing envelopes. But I prefer to save the presets in the end Design dialog box, because those are easier to access will cover these additional features in the troubleshooting section of the course. So we'll stick to the basics for now, you're always gonna want your media type to be envelope. This part is pretty self explanatory. I see a lot of questions on envelope printing that could be solved by just printing on the envelope setting because envelopes are thicker and have more layers than what your printers used to. So it needs to know to adjust for that your print quality can be high, standard or fast. I find that fast works the best as faras, avoiding black smudges on your envelopes. But of course, high quality will give you somewhat better saturated colors, crisper lines, etcetera. I always use high quality if I'm putting black text, but I'll stick to standard for this one for paper size. If you're putting open flap, you'll go into this custom box and enter your sizes right here again. This is the size of the omelet fully open, and you'll keep portrait checked here because that's how this printer works best. And then with the cannon, there's really only one source, which is the rear feed tray. There are more settings in maintaining page soda maintenance, etcetera, but for the most part, we never really deal with those an envelope printing. Unless we're attempting something more advanced, I try to steer clear of super advanced printing or just outsource that to avoid confusing in trust on my end. So once you have all this set. You click OK and in print. I'm in print again. Let's see what happened. Okay, that looks great. 9. Print Settings Laser: all right, We are an illustrator now, and we're printing on our laser printer today with the flat close are our words. Eyes is set to seven and 1/4 by five and 1/4. This is the size of the envelope. When we get into file print, we'll get the regular dialogue box for Adobe Illustrator, and there's not a lot we need to do here. You'll select a print, just the desire dartboard instead of everything. Because you might have other pieces that you've created here in this document. I'm gonna select my HP laser jet pretty cool name, and that's gonna give me all those settings that I need. The only thing we need to do here in this dialog box is make sure that the media size says just fine. By driver, this means a size. The paper in the printer is what we said it to you in the settings of the printer. Not here in the illustrate your settings. Unlike printing with the flat open, this design will be rotated because printers always lead with the shorter end of the paper . In this case, this means they'll feed vertically instead of horizontally. So we're gonna go to set up and preferences and then get into our actual printer settings of the HP. This looks different and has different options than the printer settings of my canon inkjet , and we'll have different settings than any other printer that you have a swell. We can start by clicking envelope over here and the printing shortcuts to see what that brings up. You can also save shortcuts once you have settings that you like on this printer. If the paper size you want isn't listed in this drop down over here, then you have to create a custom sized by going over to the paper quality tab, clicking customs, looking new and creating that here. We've created a lot of our common ones, so we'll go back here and select are a seven on blow perfect for envelopes. The paper source will automatically select the front tray, which is exactly what you wanted to do. The printer cannot feed on the lips from the bottom tray, and, of course, the paper type should always, always, always be envelope. You can use having envelope. It kind of doesn't matter. You can kind of get away with like heavy card stock based on these different Graham readings over here, but I just always stick with regular old envelope. Now click OK, print and, of course, print again. And let's see what happened from the laser printer. The envelopes will come out warm and slightly curled. You can change that via settings on the printer itself. If you want. I find that it doesn't last too loan or make too much of a difference. Once the envelopes are stuffed with imitations, they're also commit a slight indentation from the edges of the envelope. I don't mind it too much, and I hear it goes away the more you use your printer as things kind of loosened up. I friended about 2000 pieces on here and haven't had any noticeable difference yet. You can play the settings on heat and curl if you'd like to work with us, but I've gotten envelopes from professional printers with a little bit of this, too. It's just the give and take of laser printing versus inkjet printing 10. Troubleshooting: this action is all about troubleshooting. A lot of you had trouble with very specific issues that can come with envelope printing, so I'm gonna help answer some of those. Right now. One question I got was how to avoid wasting so many extras. And the truth is that you can't avoid running a few sample prints for each job. That's how you get things right. That's how you change your settings and find the right ones that work best. And it's just part of the drop when it comes to envelope printing, so something you can do is print on both sides of the envelope. You can also, in some cases, print upside down if you're pretty flat, close friends, since you knew the front and the back top and bottom, and that will be four total test friends on just one envelope. I like to use extras from past Tom's that aren't necessarily the same color or the exact same of a little better in the same size so I can get my printing. Correct. When you're doing this, make sure you label each one like 123 label next to it. What settings you change so between one and two. What was the studying? That you change their that way? If you like to go back to a previous version or if you'd like to remember in the future, what settings worked well for this job and you can always return to that and figure it out . And one of my best pieces of advice for printing envelopes, which is going to sound a little crazy, is to just print it again for some reason. Ah, lot of times when printing envelopes, the settings just don't fully go into place. Everything looks right on your computer, but it prints a little weird. And then I printed again, and it runs perfectly. So if you can't find, like, an obvious reason near settings or size or anything like that, um, that makes you think it's printing wrong. For that reason, then just try putting it again, and sometimes you'll get lucky, and it will work for both of these printers. I always have to make sure the paper changes size. Sometimes it doesn't on the first try, but typically it doesn't. Here, let me show you. You see how the paper is automatically set to maybe a letter size, and it's larger than the art board of the envelope, which is thes dotted lines. Well, if I go in to set up preferences and select my custom size and very it to change, but I didnt sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't, but I just go back. Click settings preferences like okay again, and it always changes that second time. Now the paper is the size of the art board, like we want it. Our next troubleshooting tip is to check your ink levels. If your levels are off or especially low in some colors, it can really affect the color of your printing. So if you're having a specific color issue, I definitely recommend checking main levels and making sure your toner cartridges or in cartridges are full. I always keep an extra set of ink cartridges for my canon on hand. They should be the cartridges air a lot more extensive, and they last a lot longer, so I don't keep them on hand, but I do order them as they're needed. It gives me plenty of warning when they're low. I also always use name brand cartridges and my printer. The reason for this is if you use off brain ones, not only can you ruin your printer potentially if they're bad really cheap ones, but you can also, in most cases, voided your warranty on your printer. So if you were to have to send it and we're trying to get a return or something that wouldn't be valid if you had previously used offering cartridges and the printers. Comptel. They're very advanced these days, despite being a little finicky, so they do cost a little bit more. But it's just not worth the money to me to risk it for the cannon. I go to my printers and my computer and I click the splendor. I could manage printer property used and go this maintenance tab and I click view printer status. And then we go to any details, which would show here this is lots of steps. But frankly, this printers decent at telling me what it needs. More ink and the details pop up every time you're actually printing, so you don't need to go through all these steps if you're working on a real job while we're here. If you get any weird lines or grainy details right here, is where you fix those as well. Try a cleaning, deep cleaning print, head alignment, novel check and potentially a roller cleaning as well. I don't have to clean this printer a lot personally, but that will be my first instinct if the print looked grainy ist body or headlines or blocks printed on. To be honest, I don't know how to check the time her levels for the HP on my computer. So I always check those on the printer itself. I click supplies, and as you can see, they're very low. I have had these cartridges since July, so that's all right. I also do the cleaning and maintenance in this set up section over here. I have to run a cleaning page with almost every new job on this printer to avoid scuffs or smudges, especially when I'm switching out my white and black toner cartridges. Keeping things clean is more important on a later, because there's powder and he involved, and both of those can go awry pretty easily. The cannon has another really amazing feature for color adjustment. Sometimes you just need to print something a little darker or lighter, and it's an easy adjustment sometimes, however, what you print on your screen doesn't look at all like what's coming out, and you have to make some crazy adjustments. But how do you even know where to start? So let's go into our prints out of here ends like the cannon. I change my artwork to a bright green for this example, how not pretty is that which is the top color to print. So if I just pregnant as is, it looks like this, so that's a little bit off, but we're not exactly sure how to adjust. Shall we make things darker, greener, more blue, maybe. And by how much? So we'll going to set up and preferences, of course, and we'll click this color intensity manual adjustment. It opens out this action where we can physically make those changes for the print without making them to the actual art on the document. Now, do I recommend always making these changes here? No, because if you ever have to friend this color again, you want the artwork to be accurate in case you forget your exact adjustment. But to start, you might want to click this button that says print a pattern for color adjustment and then I know print the design with a bunch of different adjustments. As you can see in this little preview right here, they'll have little values. It's very small here. They all have little values of C M and why that they changed. So you can see if you want to go further in the yellow direction, for instance, and by how much this is so, so helpful. I do recommend, however, going back to your actual artwork and addressing It seemed like a value. For instance, if you want to go more yellow, um, adjuster, cm wider, have more. Why in it in approximately these numbers here, instead of just printing with the adjustment on the front settings, what should you do if your envelope assembly doesn't print? For me, this typically means that it's not plugged in or not plugged into my computer. So make sure that your printer is plugged in and it's communicating with your computer correctly. And then, from there I would check your network settings to make sure that it hasn't disconnected from your WiFi or something like that. If you try restarting everything and started him back out and it still doesn't print that. I'd recommend calling tech support as this could be a larger issue. Another issue guys told me about Waas smudging and Mark X Mondays are so so common when you're printing envelopes. To some extent, you may just have a couple for bash, and you could just trash them. I always print 10 to 15 extra of anything that I'm printing for. This reason, with envelopes of this much is a really due to the fact there's a couple layers, and then you have this flap here. That's not really adaptions hanging on so that can confuse your printer about what is actually printing on and what it should hold onto. You get these smudges more on envelopes that are extra thick cotton. Me really soft. Something like handmade paper is more likely to get smudges as well. If the envelopes had been opened for a while and then you close them to print, that's gonna confuse your printer, because this is gonna be hanging open alot kind of like this. So if you're gonna print them close, keep them close, or if you've already opened them, you may want to smash them on her book for a few hours or something just to make that flat more flush with the rest of the envelope. Anything you can do to make them thinner and flatter before printing is gonna help with the smudges. I know people who literally iron every sheet of hand a paper before they run it through their Brenner. So anything, you know, smash form of means of books iron. I'm keeping close, keeping on their packaging. That's all gonna help you in the long run. Okay, If you get a tiny smudge, that's probably not a huge issue. You can typically get that off with a combo of a need, an eraser and a standard racer. I mean, like a video for you that I have already about getting rid of calligraphy mistakes, which is the same general principle, is getting rid of a smudge from the printer. If you're getting a lot of smudges on a particular job, don't freak out. Try running a cleaning page first or cleaning your rollers on your printer because something might just be in there and it's like clogging up, getting on every single page you never know. And the most likely cause of the smudges is that you're not using the envelope setting for media type When you print on my canon, I can also choose high standard or fast and with envelopes, particularly printing on high quality tends to lead to a lot more smudging because they're in the printer longer. You want to get those envelopes in and out of the printer as quickly as possible to go a standard or try fast to avoid smudging. If your peace prince rotated 90 degrees or upside down, then you just need to add it. One simple print setting. We'll come into the print dialog box and instead of you'll find these little people that are turned every which way. So if you're printing upside down, we have him upside down. Right now, we just select the opposite, and this P will show you the direction. If it's printing 90 degrees, you select which way you want to rotate the print, and that should fix that issue. Off center designs typically mean you have the wrong size paper selected. Make sure you're measuring the size of your envelope and not printing the size of the card that goes in the envelope. For instance, in a seven envelope holds a five by seven card, but the envelope itself is not five by seven. Printing off center can also have to do with the rotation of the art board, so make sure that these outside paper lines our line up correctly with your artwork in the print settings. In general. If your art word and your envelopes are the same size, you won't need to touch any of these proportion settings, and you should be putting an actual size or do not scale. If you're envelopes print crooked, there are a few things you could do. I find that typically it means these little grippers that hold my envelope in place or not tight enough. This is especially important on the cannon I found, so I always read tightened those after every five or so prince as they loosen up with each envelope. This can also be in common when printing open flat, but only on the flat. The printer will feed quickly and not stop to put down any on the main rectangular part of the envelope, and then it will try to grip the flap, which is a totally different shape than the printer understands, so things get wonky. I like to print return addresses close flat. To avoid this, I also find that envelopes are fairly, often not perfectly straight. This means of the addresses won't feed perfectly. No matter what you do. In this case, I typically actually rotate the artwork. Just click our enter and I go like 0.1 degree in one direction. You could see that tiny little shift there, and that will help give a little leeway to your design on a crooked and blow and make the I feel like it's straight, even if it's not actually straight. Otherwise, you could have an alignment issue with your printer, which will require a much larger fix, and you'll likely need to call the manufacturer for troubleshooting. One question I got was about and loves getting bent or crunched on the printer does just happen sometimes, and there's not too much of a fix for it. I find that my Egypt does not like to print flat closed at all. It always catches on the flap and jams, no matter which direction I place it. I have in the past used washing tape to tape down every single flat before printing, and that helped. But much easier fix was to just print close slap on my laser printer instead. 11. 4 Bars: all right for more envelopes require their home video because their own level of pain in the butt to print and how Thean jet printer that we have is frankly not recommended for anything smaller than four inches for more on loves far below four inches width wise. And you won't even be allowed to change the paper to that size if you try. So what you have to do is trick the printer into thinking that larger you can simply open them. And what the open size as the paper size. This gets bigger than four inches. However, it also typically leads to crooked prints because the grippers air trying to hold onto these flaps, which are diagonal lines and grippers, really don't know what to do with those. The best fix I found for this issue on the Cuban at least, is to put a five by seven piece of paper in each for a bar on blow before printing. I just use old misprinted imitation, their whole stack right here. Then you said the paper size 25 by seven, and the printer is typically better at handling them this way because they can grip ah, full five by seven rectangle. Sometimes if they're all printing about the same amount of crooked, then I'll simply rotate the artwork a tiny debt. I'm talking like 0.1 degree here and make that work. I also always, always, always print at least 20 extra artists VP envelopes, because I know they're gonna be some issues. However, the HP laser printer can handle former envelopes as is and is pretty good at handling them . Some of them will likely still print a little bit crooked. So, like I said presently, 20 extra, and that way you'll have enough good ones to make up for the bad ones. I really wish I could give you some magic words to say to print these guys really easily. It doesn't seem like it should be too hard doesn't mean they're They're just envelopes. Everyone has envelopes. Everyone prints on envelopes somehow. But the truth doesn't no matter how good you get at it, there's always a little bit of trialling air in a couple of mistakes along the way, the thing that you can get better at is anticipating what those mistakes might be and learning how to compensate for them in your business. 12. White Printing: I'm sure a lot of you have questions about how we print white ink on envelopes in house. And it's all due to Cosmo, this handy HP laser printer and a little thing called Ghost Toner. Basically, in some laser printers, only some you can replace the black toner cartridge with something called a Ghost Turner cartridge, which allows anything that's black on your screen. Do print in white. Here's my HP laser linked below. Of course, his name is Cosmo. I can open this front section and pull out all the toners. The front one is black, so I can remove that without touching anything. Except the handle, especially this blue roller needs to be protected. Then I'll replace it with our ghost toner cartridge and then place this productive peace around the black one and leave the white one in here. Package this one out for safekeeping, and we're going to get when I go to print something white. I just have to make sure everything on my screen is 100% K and see him like that. This means completely black, with no other colors in it, just like it is here. Then, for extra measure, when I go to Prince. Also, select this print in Grey Scale on to make sure we're not accidentally printing any other colors and voila! Here's that white print. This works best on smooth papers and isn't really a heavy enough print for a full flood or a large design and solid white. It's great for a text and line drawings, though, as you can see here as a reminder, you cannot do this with every laser printer, so make sure you check out the Ghost Hunter website for a list of the compatible ones. All of our stuff is listed below, including are linked to purchasing the Ghost Hunter on Amazon, which we found is the best place to do it for fast delivery as ghost hundreds based overseas. 13. Bleed Printing: all right, Here's the subject you all wanted to know about. Bleed. Printing bleed. Printing on the HP is not recommended. This is because it uses toner powder, so you're printing the toner powder outside the actual realm of paper. It could get stuck inside that printer and calls issues further down the line. Because of Canon uses ink. It is a little bit better of an option for printing a bleed design, although it can still be tricky to get it quite right. Bleeding over the flap is pretty easy because you've already told the printer that we're putting a rectangular piece of paper in this size, staying in it pretty much as is. And it'll just automatically print off the edge of the flap because there's no paper there fronting. A bleed on the bottom of the envelope, however, is also possible with the cannon as a reminder of the cannon does not handle close lot printing, so bleeding from the left or right edge is going to be very difficult. You can always, however, a printing design that goes over the top edge and onto the flap, putting up a flap, of course, or just friend, something that will bleed off the bottom of the envelope as a reminder about what bleed printing really is. Your design will need to continue at least 1/8 inch off of the artwork, and part of it will not make it onto your envelopes to make sure it's not anything too important. If you want to stop your design precisely at the edge of the envelope, if the envelope shifts even the tiniest bit imprinting, which it will, then you'll have an awkward white section where the dying, where the design just kind of ends. Not a true bleed where the design continues off the page, which is what we want in the print settings. You also like this borderless printing, which you see it won't actually let us do with envelope as the media type. That's OK, but just remember that if you can't print on the envelope setting, you'll have more smudges and many to print more extras. I recommend still going with that standard setting because it's a little bit faster than high, and we'll get the envelope out and help avoid a little bit of those smudges. You also can't use a custom paper size in the borderless setting. Always use eight by 10 for an a seven envelope, as it's only a little bit larger than my envelope. And the last thing you'll need to do is right here where you change this. Why margin to zero? We want this baby printing as close to the border as possible. In this particular example, we are actually going to want to rotate it the other way. And as you see, it bleeds off the paper in here as well. And voila! Here is how that friend, if he, of course, have a smudge in this corner which we could remove, but they tend to get better. The more that you prints, though, I would recommend going through and printing this a few more times to make sure that's much will go away. If it is permanent, then you may want to try that fast setting that we talked about again. You can't use the humble of sanding if you're printing borderless, so that's just something you're gonna have to deal with and do a little trouble shooting on to get the best settings for your printer 14. Feeding Your Envelopes: So what do you do when you're actually printing the envelopes? How many do you feed it a time? How do you prevent jam? How quickly does this go? This is often depend on the printer, so let's get into it. The cannon jet feeds as many as can fit back here without this little flap remaining open that will give you an error. It's about 12 to 15 depending on the thickness of the envelopes. I always just leave my stack right here and refill every time it stops. Printing this printer slope very slow so it can frankly take hours, especially if I'm not just sitting here refilling the feed. The second empties up. Revealing the feed doesn't affect the speed of printing in any way, shape or form. So just allow yourself time to go to a leisurely pace with us as a reminder every time you refill, plant easel, side grippers and as tight as possible to encourage traitor printing. HP, on the other hand, is pretty fast. It has to stop and clean a lot more often, but its output is very quick. While it's actively printing the envelope feed tray can only handle about five envelopes at a time, and if you let it get empty, then it will definitely rest and clean or cool down from the heat. Then it takes a while to start back up again. So for this reason, I always stand next to this printer and actively put more envelopes in as they're fed. If I never let it get totally empty as its printing, it'll print 100 50 envelopes in about 15 minutes. If it gets empty, that's so fine. But it will just take longer. It's worth noting that most printers will have a specific direction. You should face the envelopes for best printing. This isn't really apply for printing open flap. But when you print close slap on the HP, there's little diagram on the tray, which shows you the specific direction for the envelopes. The slow guy right here. The truth does. Every printer has a slightly different temperaments and needs its own version of coddling, and cubs seemed to work correctly. You will actually really get used to the strange noises and tendencies of your printer as you go along with it, so I recommend just practicing paying attention, and you'll be surprised at how quickly you kind of learn how toe Khanal and coax your printer into working better 15. Class Project: all right, Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope that you learned so much. And even if you don't have my printers, that you can adapt them to the printers that you're using to make this process a little bit easier. Your class project is, of course, to print some of your own envelopes and upload a photo to the class projects. Um, I'm super excited to see what you come up with, and I'd be happy to offer any feedback or answer any questions that you leave. In the comments I do recommend starting simple with addresses and maybe a small design element or something before delving into more complex things like whiting printing. Believe printing, etcetera. You can find all of our favorite printers and suppliers of envelopes and are printed paper vendor guide and learn how we put invitations together in our wedding invitation assembly. God, we also have a ton of free resources for stationary designers that you can access on our YouTube channel in our block. And everything that I've just mentioned is linked in your class. Pdf that you can download below this video. Thanks, everyone