Printing press plates for cards

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Mark70Z

"Really" like the way you have the display set up. Any way to get a picture of how you have this whole players collection set up maybe a bit farther away? I see, I think, a transparency and the Topps file of items the player received as gifts. Some neat items you have there.

Also, I wish I knew more on the printing process (even though it's been explained to me before) since there are at least 6 plates for the same card. Plus they have the color separations, transparency, print photo, etc for each card produced?!?

Modern stuff will typically only have four plates/colors. Topps did a few things a bit differently at times, and did a lot more proofing prototyping, etc than the place I worked. We pretty much did almost no proofing at all. Maybe a mockup to get customer approval, but I wasn't involved in the sales end at all.

I think Topps did so much because they needed a lot of approvals for the different sets.

Because they did so much, some of what they did is pretty foreign to me. For example I never saw one of the transparent overlay proofs until Topps vault started selling them.

I think once the proofing was over their production system was very close to what I'm familiar with.

Steve B

Steve B