I was fortunate to get a tour of Panther Printing here in Sioux Falls, SD, for my layout class.
I had never heard of them previously, I honestly don’t know any printing companies, but it was actually really interesting to learn about!
First we talked with one of the graphic designers that has been working there for many, many years. I guess I never really thought too much about how many jobs there actually is when it comes to printing, so I didn’t even know that graphic designers work there as well. Their jobs are actually extremely important as they not just design for customers but also help them fix up their existing designs to make sure that it will look and print the way they want it to.
We were also given a tour of the warehouse portion where all the machines were running. We saw t-shirts getting their designs printed on a spinning rotating machine that was a lot different than I expected!
Then we saw the largest machine which was paper printing. We watched the process of the machine passing through all the CMYK colors in their own individual sections. I learned that what’s actually being printed on the paper are the tiniest little dots all grouped together, rather than just a glob of color.
It was a really interesting place to visit and gave me a new perspective on continuing to work in this industry!