Most organizations need a printing service on a regular basis, whether it is for promotional purposes or intra-company communication. Therefore, it is important to have some basic knowledge of how printing works, particularly offset printing, which is one of the most widely employed printing techniques.

The users and the printers like offset printing due to its cost effectiveness for the production of large number of prints. The clients giving bulk printing orders are recommended by the printers to choose offset printing because of this reason.

Offset printing employs oil based ink, which does not blend with water. The offset printing gets its name from the fact that the designs are transmitted indirectly from the plates to the paper by use of rubber blankets as the medium.

First step is to prepare the graphics. Film negatives were used in the earlier times for making images and then reproducing them to aluminum based printing plates. This is no longer required as the technology is available for making the plates in one go through an image setting system. This plate is then placed on a cylinder with the correct side up. Then the water and ink are spread on the image plates, in that order. While the ink gets stuck to the image, the water gets attached to that part of the plate which has no image so that the ink does not spread beyond the image.

After being painted with the ink, the image is put on a rubber blanket which is on a different cylinder, resulting in the image to be inversed. Subsequently, sheets of paper of required proportions are put together and the rubber blankets transfer the image to the sheets on a third cylinder, where it comes out as the right side.

The task of printing is finished by the printing company by consolidating the printed sheets using staples or paste or in any other way as per the needs of the client.