One Century on the Books

The year is 2011. This year marks the 100th year of the incorporation of Printed Specialties Inc. (division of Keystone Printing).

Keystone Printing, started in 1903 in Scranton, PA by Philip J. Fischer.

Incorporated in 1911 by Philip J. Fischer, then Keystone Printed Specialties, the company started out producing trading stamps, later adding other specialty items such as posters, billboards & calendars. In 1924, Keystone began printing record labels. Then in 1928, die-cut items, such as jigsaw puzzles and folding cartons became the main focus of production. By the 1980's, Keystone Printing was one of the leading manufacturers of record labels and other items for the recording industry.

Philip J. Fischer passed away in 1939, leaving his son Philip G. Fischer to take over. He was Keystone Printed Specialties' President & CEO until 1988. P.G. Fischer's son, Martin C. Fischer took over as President & CEO until selling the business in 2005.

Printed Specialties became incorporated in the State of Georgia in 1983 by P. G. Fischer. At the time, Printed Specialties was a division of Keystone Printed Specialties in Scranton, PA. P. G. Fischer was the President of both factions. In 1994, his daughter Karen F. Smith purchased Printed Specialties, making it a separate and distinct company. Being the new President, she had to help lead the company from commercial printing and into paperboard packaging (cartons, CD & DVD packaging, mailers, etc.).

Later in 2008, Karen's son, Gregory M. Smith, was promoted to President of Printed Specialties Inc. and Karen was promoted to CEO/Chairman of the Board. Greg has given a wealth of computer knowledge and updated all the systems. He also brought in a fervent desire to build the company into a packaging company that is known for its quality, unique packaging ideas, personal service to each client, and the best all around customer service. Greg Smith marks the fourth generation in this family business.

Printed Specialties no doubt has a rich and lush printing history, which is why we are proud of where we've come from and where that is leading us. All this year we will be celebrating and remembering our past, and giving bits of information (plus more old time-y looking pictures that are actually old time-y!), to let you into our family's background. Not many family owned businesses can say that they have been around and managed to keep it within the family as long as we have.

Be sure to check out our main website printedspecialties.com for more information!

Be well,

Sometimes Being Rich Ain't Everything.

Rich black, in printing, is an ink mixture of solid black over one or more of the other CMYK colors, resulting in a darker tone than black ink alone generates in a printing process. (courtesy of Google.)


Here at PSI we highly encourage the use of rich black. We prefer the formula of C-40%, M-30%, Y-30%, and K-100%. The use of it can come in handy across a variety of jobs, and not only does it help the pressmen out a lot and makes for a smoother run, it tends to make the final printed piece look great and "pop" more. 


Now in some cases where there's an image with a lot of black built in (say a Photoshop file or JPEG) laying on top of a black background made in Illustrator...

Things can get kind of tricky if the black of the image and the background don't match and there's a lot of coverage. When I turned separations preview on in Illustrator and turned the Black channel off, this was what I was looking at...

The top left corner is the build (CMYK rich black), and everything else is a placed graphic. This would not be good on press, as there would be noticeable color shifts all over the page (this was a large job).


To alleviate this potential press headache, I had to sample the black in the placed images, copy down the formula of CMYK, then apply that to the background in the Illustrator file. The result now with the Black channel off is...

Beautiful. The pressmen will thank us later.

Y2K11? Really?

Oh, the horror.

iPhone alarms malfunctioning. Gas prices rising. Zsa Zsa Gabor losing a leg.

Is this the apocalypse cometh? Surely not.

While my iPhone alarm has remained unscathed, the new year has indeed brought trouble into my life. Earlier this morning my boss alerted me to look at our server folders on my Mac. Thinking nothing of it, I looked. And to my dismay I saw this...

Apparently we were busy.

Surely all those folders weren't made all at the same time on that day?! I wasn't even here! No one was.

Strange indeed. A system bug obviously, but we're not really sure what to do about it. Luckily all the enclosed folders remained like they were pre-macapocalypse.

Help me, Steve Jobs. You're my only hope.

Be well.