Ahhhhh, Vegas. The lights, the sounds, the entertainment and the printing press. Wait, you probably don’t go to Las Vegas for the printing press do you? Well, we do. Each month the staff at San Diego Magazine works hard to produce the best publication possible along with other projects we work on throughout the year. When these projects are done, they need to be printed. A common misunderstanding is that we print our publications in house, but the reality is the kind of printer it takes, is almost the size of a football field and costs around 16 million dollars.
Recently, I got the chance to visit the Creel Printing Company in Las Vegas to observe the printing of one of our latest projects, The Official San Diego Visitors Guide. The whole process of printing a magazine is nothing short of amazing. Housed in a building that could park multiple jumbo jets, huge “web press” printers feed paper through at astonishing speeds. Oh and there are not just one of these printers at Creel, there are 3. Pages are printed from 16 page “forms” and checked for color consistency and registration by a “pressman.” Once all the pages are printed they are fed through a binding machine and then cut to size. The whole process takes less than a day, and that’s for over 40,000 copies. Just amazing. Check out the videos and photos below for a look inside Creel Printing.
Check out the photos and videos below!
