Pumpkin Spice Printing is Back!

Here at NEBCAL Printing we look forward to the return of pumpkin spice printing every year.

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When the press room and bindery, not to mention the staff kitchen, smell so good we know fall is coming. At least it’s coming somewhere.

Here in San Diego we look forward to wearing sweaters and mittens all year. Fortunately, we have to wait for decades to wear any of these warm clothes. However, despite almost no need whatsoever, we do switch from flip flops to boots, mostly because of the pictures on Pinterest. Check out our NEBCAL Pinterest page!

But back to the #pumpkinspiceprinting… It’s just a joke. There’s no such thing. But imagine if we could print everything in the fall with scratch and sniff in #pumpkinspice! Wouldn’t that be amazing? And save tons of calories too!

Here at NEBCAL Printing, we can print #scratchandsniff on any surface with any fragrance, including pumpkin spice obviously.

Here’s a recipe for pumpkin spice coffee cake. It’s a real recipe. This and the link to our Pinterest page are the only serious things in this blog.

#NEBCAL #printing #pumpkinspice #thanksgiving #fall #sweaterweather

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Give a 2020 Calendar to Your Customers

Calendars, despite the variety of digital tools available, are still a great way to get and keep your company’s name in front of your customers’ eyes every day of the year.

There’s a comfort in having a paper calendar and they make it easy to see a whole month at a time. Unlike an online calendar tool, a desk calendar still gives users the chance to jot down appointments and phone numbers quickly. And with your company name and logo on the calendar, your customer will be reminded to call you more often.

Revive an old tradition of giving a gift to your customers at the holidays this year. We recommend that gift be a calendar, of course! Pair it with a few branded pens, keychains, or coasters and your customers will have you on their minds every day.

At NEBCAL Printing, we can help you design a fantastic-looking calendar for 2020. We offer single card, month-by-month, and full-year calendars. We can print at low or high volume and during the month of September, we are offering $50 off your calendar order.

Call 858-558-0100 or visit our website to see more details.

A Visit to a Printing Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia

Recently, I took a trip of a lifetime to Finland, Estonia, and Russia. In Helsinki, I saw the crisp Scandinavian design aesthetic in Helsinki, as well as their charming archipelago of rocky islands in the Baltic Sea. The Finns love boating and spending time splashing in the sea, when it’s not frozen solid, of course.

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Then I flew to Moscow. It was 40 degrees cooler so that was a blessing, but navigating the subway was challenging. I had learned some of the Cyrillic Alphabet before I left on my trip and it was a life saver. When I was looking for a Megaphone store to change the SIM in my phone, I was grateful I could sound out МЕГАФОН and get back on the Internet/Google Maps, which is so easy to take for granted when you are home.

I learned more about the history of Russia while in Moscow, especially at Bunker 42 and The Gulag History Museum.

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A few days later I took the high-speed train to St. Petersburg, a city designed by Tsar Peter the Great to “Westernize” Russia and impress outsiders with Russia’s wealth. St. Petersburg is indeed impressive. The palaces, architecture, canals, art, and just plain glitz are astounding.

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Though I was the only person there at the time, it seemed entirely natural that I would visit The Printing Museum. (Printing Nerds Unite!) Plus, it was included on my St. Petersburg tourist card, so I went. I think the Uber driver thought I was nuts when he dropped me off!

Housed in a corner building on a canal, this museum is the place where Russia’s famous Pravda newspaper was first printed, though briefly in 1917. Pravda means truth and was the official newspaper of the Communist Party. Lenin spent some time living and writing there too.

The equipment in the printing museum was in a beautiful light-filled room. There was a rope in front of the equipment, but I used a translator app to ask the attendant if I could step behind it and take detailed photos of the equipment. She shrugged and I took that for a “yes”. Stacks of paper and hot metal type were displayed, along with samples of printed work from long ago. It was clear from all the samples left on display from many decades ago, that printing flyers, posters, newspapers, advertisements, and postcards have been important for people for a long time.

It wasn’t hard to see how these early pieces of printing equipment evolved into the ones we use at NEBCAL Printing today. There were folding, drilling, and binding machines, along with several kinds of printing presses. My visit to the museum was fun and quirky, and it was a treat to see a bit of history off the beaten path.

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I’ve been blessed to live in Europe twice and visit numerous times, so I wasn’t sure I needed to go to Russia. But it seemed clear to me that knowing more about this part of Europe was required to understand the whole continent and its important history.

#printing #onlineprinting #NEBCAL #commercialprinting #graphicdesign #booklets #brochures #businesscards #flyers #banners #vinylbanners #tradeshow #branding #foil #SpotUV #PatternGlue #stationery #envelopes #posters #doorhangers #labels #stickers #print #printingservices  #retail #legal #lawfirm #realestate #newspapers

San Diego Online Printing vs. NEBCAL Printing

NEBCAL Printing and San Diego Online Printing Logos

Along with NEBCAL Printing, San Diego Online Printing is based at 9240 Mira Este Ct here in the Miramar area of San Diego, near the famous “Top Gun” Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. We are also near numerous craft breweries and their delicious brewing aromas often fill the air outside.

So you might wonder why we are two companies here in the same place. Let me explain.

NEBCAL Printing has been in business for more than 41 years. We are a specialty, custom commercial printer, using large and small printing presses. Sometimes we talk about this as “ink on paper”, though we print on all sorts of materials to create unique promotional items, eye-catching vinyl banners, and various items like labels, neighborhood signs, and even business cards on plastic. We often provide design services for our customers.

San Diego Online Printing comes into play when a customer already has their art ready to upload. Our fun, DIY, online system guides the customer through the design, materials selection, and purchasing process. Then we use our digital presses to print hundreds of different items, at exceptional prices, and with super-fast turnaround. Our customers are always delighted with the quality of the 4-color digital printing and since we always proof your work before it prints, they know their job will be perfect. Plus, most domestic jobs get delivered or shipped for free.

So when you have a more technical job that needs special attention, call us at NEBCAL Printing and when you need it fast and have your specs in mind, order online at SanDiegoPrinting.Online

#printing #onlineprinting #sandiegoprinting #commercialprinting #graphicdesign #booklets #brochures #businesscards #flyers #banners #vinylbanners #tradeshow #branding #stationery #envelopes #posters #doorhangers #labels #stickers #print #printingservices #realestate #lawfirm #government #miltary #usa #SeHablaEspanol #local #SanDiego 

Online Listings Improvement for NEBCAL Printing and San Diego Online Printing

NEBCAL Printing and San Diego Online Printing LogosMy first task here at NEBCAL Printing and San Diego Online Printing was complex and more challenging than I thought it would be. Eighteen months after relocating to a new premises, dozens of online listings still had our old address listed.

Compounding matters, another printer, similarly named, had moved into our previous location. You can imagine the difficulties, when someone looked up our address online, then made the trek to the incorrect address, only to be completely confused by the fact that another printing company was there.

My first task to address the situation was to contact Google My Business. I recovered and revived the NEBCAL Printing property and set up a new one for San Diego Online Printing. Making Google My Business work for NEBCAL Printing was easy. We had a sign on the building for NEBCAL Printing, which is a key indicator of a solid business that Google’s customers can find from the street.

I set up NEBCAL Printing’s Google My Business with a cover photo, an address, lots of photos of our printed products, staff, and exterior. Every week, I also create social media posts to the account. Almost immediately, we were rewarded with the Knowledge Graph to the right of our search results.

In the past, unscrupulous companies had taken advantage of multiple sham businesses in the same location. To manage this situation, Google is now very particular about listing more than one business at the same address, especially if both are in the same industry.

For example, if you have a dry cleaner at a physical address and want to run a soccer camp out of the back end of the building, using the same address, you just might get Google to believe that you have two businesses there. You can’t fool Google with different suite numbers either. And you certainly don’t want to mess with Google because they can de-list both businesses altogether, meaning when people search for you, your company won’t appear at all.

Therefore, completing the setup for Google My Business for San Diego Online Printing was more challenging. NEBCAL Printing is a commercial printer for specialty print jobs that usually require a phone call or two to manage the work. San Diego Online Printing, on the other hand, is an online, digital printing operation with a fun, DIY interface. We run both operations out of the same address at 9240 Mira Este Ct, in San Diego. To us, these are separate operations, but Google just doesn’t see it that way. Two printing companies operated by the same people at the same address look like one company to Google.

After a call to the helpful folks at Google, they agreed to let us have a second Google My Business property for San Diego Online Printing, so long as I didn’t specify the address in the listing. Mostly, our San Diego Online Printing customers handle their orders without ever coming into the premises or even making a phone call. That’s not to say that Google doesn’t know where the business is – they will tell anyone who searches for it where it is – but it’s not listed on the account.

With Google sorted out, I moved on to the other listings which had our old address. Most of the listings were unreachable through the phone, online, or by snail mail. The sort of listing I’m referring to are online Yellow Pages type sites. I suspect they keep these sites going to run ads, but don’t really care about the accuracy of the listings and make it impossible to reach them. Others like MapQuest and Better Business Bureau are happy to update your contact information upon request. We found that a service through Yahoo Small Business called Yext would, for a fee, work on changing the bulk of the listings for us.

After a couple of months, most of the listings had been updated by Yext and we cancelled our subscription. I continued to work at the remaining unchanged sites one by one, and finally, when our search results were accurate for the first two or three SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages), I felt like my work there was complete for now.

Apple Maps required us to install a sign on the building for San Diego Online Printing and when that was up, I notified them and they too updated their listing. I was careful to take photos of the sign installation and sent those to Apple as well, to prove that we didn’t just Photoshop the image of the sign onto the building.

It took a concentrated effort to make these updates, but we are already seeing increased business because of these and other endeavors.

#printing #onlineprinting #NEBCAL #SanDiegoOnlinePrinting #commercialprinting #graphicdesign #booklets #brochures #businesscards #flyers #banners #vinylbanners #tradeshow #branding #stationery #envelopes #posters #doorhangers #labels #stickers #print #printingservices #online #GoogleMyBusiness #AppleMaps #Yext #SERPs

Earth Day 2019

It’s hard to believe that anyone isn’t deeply concerned about the environment these days. But this concern isn’t new. The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970. People have been sounding the alarm bells before and since then.

Since then, cars have become cleaner-burning and while the air is certainly cleaner here in California, people in India and China die every year because of pollution. Asthma rates everywhere have skyrocketed. We get whipped up about banning plastic straws but still find there is a garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas. Plastic litters every beach in the world and some beaches are choked with it, depending on the ocean currents. We dutifully separate  our recyclables but it is unclear what happens to them after that. And there are news stories that suggest that most filmy plastic can never be recycled. When plastic breaks down, tiny pieces enter the water and food supply.

So what does all this have to do with printing? Printed materials could seem like a waste of resources, but in fact, paper is one of the most recyclable materials we have. We use recycled papers and recycle our scraps. We use soy-based inks that produce far less VOCs and make paper easier to recycle than other, petroleum-based inks.

Companies that chose to print their marketing materials, forms, and business cards are making a thoughtful decision about how to do business. Choosing a printer like NEBCAL Printing or our online sister organization San Diego Online Printing is a smart decision. We use resources carefully, economizing on how much paper we use for each job, use recycled paper when possible, use soy-based inks, and recycle our scraps.

When your customer is holding your thoughtfully designed, professionally printed brochure or business card, that attention to detail – and the earth – will shine through.

 

 

NEBCAL Printing Can Print Anything

We have the ability to print brochures, business cards, and forms, of course, but we are print brokers, which allows us to find the best prices anywhere on whatever you need printed.

Here in house we have large and small format offset printing, complimented by a complete range of services such as folding, drilling, laminating, stitching, mailing, and graphic design.

We are digital printers too. Check out sandiegoprinting.com when you need to print very quickly and use our online portal to design, pay, and order.NEBCAL_BusCardsWeb255