Magazine Printing – Edmonton – Capital Colour Press

There’s nothing like a freshly published magazine arriving in the mail.

We print magazines for Edmonton & all surrounding areas.

Cracking it open, it’s a world of possibilities in print form – and it’s a guaranteed way to get your message in front of your clients, association members, recruits or donors!

Capital Colour Press
The most technologically advanced magazine printer in Edmonton
Magazine Printing Services
780-465-8080

4904 89 St NW, Edmonton
25+ years experience printing magazines for Edmonton & area clients

We are committed to exceptional customer service

Capital Colour prints magazines for delivery to Edmonton, Calgary and as well as all over Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Our team of experienced and friendly staff is here to help you with your full colour magazine offset printing. Whether you need 10 – 100,000 magazines printed, we can help you find ways to manage your magazine production, from printing to mailing.

We can meet your timelines. Our printing plant runs several 24 hour-a-day production shifts per week.

Our print shop is set up to do short and medium runs of full colour magazines. With our sheet-fed printing presses, in-house saddle-stitching and extended production hours, we can produce top quality, beautiful publications while also meeting your tight production schedules.

When planning your custom magazine, start with the format first.

One of the main costs of producing a magazine is the printing. Choosing the right format is critically important. While a custom size gives your magazine a distinct look, it’s often inefficient to print, and potentially awkward to mail, and not fit any standard newsstands.

If you want to be efficient with your printing, we recommend choosing a standard magazine size that makes best use of the printing press size. 8.5″ x 11″ is the main format most magazines print. The smaller 5.5″ x 8.5″ format, is another good choice.

Magazine Printing FAQ

How many pages does your magazine have?

For printing costs, page count is the next major factor after quantity. The more pages your magazine has, the more paper and printing it needs.

Be careful counting pages. Sometimes people new to magazines get confused on how printers count pages, and ask for the wrong thing in their requests for quotes. For us, we need to know how many ‘numbered’ pages there are in your magazine, not the number of pieces of paper.

If you take a magazine and open the cover, that page on the right side would be page 1. Flip page 1, and you have pages 2 and 3. The total number of text pages will add up to be a multiple of 4, such as 32, 36, 40, 44, etc.

The page count doesn’t include the cover. Your magazine might have 64 pages ‘plus cover’, which refers to the extra 4 pages added by a cover. This is made up of the front cover, inside cover, inside back cover and back cover.

Should I print full colour or black and white?

At one time, it was a big printing decision to add full colour into a magazine because it was so expensive to do. But today, most magazines are printed full colour because the cost of printing has come down significantly (and advertisers like to see their ads in big, beautiful colour!).

If your content doesn’t need full colour, such as if you are publishing a magazine full of short stories, you can definitely save money by just running black ink on the interior text pages.

What if you want just one page of full colour in your black and white magazine? Yes, you can do that, but because the pages are printed in sets of 8 (for an 8.5″ x 11″ book) – you will be paying for full colour on ALL those pages, whether you use it or not. If this is your situation, talk to us and we can show you how that breaks down.

What paper stock is best for magazines?

The great thing about printing your magazine on Capital Colour’s sheet-fed presses is you have plenty of choices on paper and finishes to match your intended audience.

A premium consumer lifestyle magazine can be printed on thicker coated paper with an extra gloss finish. A small not-for-profit news magazine can be printed on lighter paper to reduce weight (and therefore mailing costs), with a dull finish on its cover.

When selecting lighter papers, make sure you see a printed sample to see how much ‘show though’ there is. ‘Show through’ is when you can see the content on the other side of the sheet because it is so thin. Sometimes that’s an acceptable trade-off, but other times you may want to up the paper quality.

If you are torn between two papers (Ha – see what we did there?), we can make up paper ‘dummies’ for your magazine. These are one-off mock ups of your finished magazine with the same number of blank pages. With this you can get a sense for what your book will feel like in your hands. You also can get an accurate weight for your magazine, and get estimates on mailing costs.

What is the right quantity to print?

At Capital Colour, any large volume printing job is produced all in one production cycle on our offset printing presses. Our offset presses are sheet-fed, which means we can offer competitive pricing for magazines ranging in quantities from 500 – 10,000 copies. For quantities smaller than 500 we would print on our digital presses.

Printing in volume keeps the cost per unit low, but it also means you need to decide at the beginning how many copies you anticipate you will distribute.

Learning a week after your order is delivered that you are short and need another 2000 copies means redoing the whole job. On the other hand, if you over-order and end up with thousands of leftover copies to put in storage, that’s not good either.

When planning your printing quantities, have a solid idea of where exactly you’ll be distributing them – whether it is through your existing mailing list or newsstand distribution service. Keeping a close eye on your distribution numbers will make your bottom line better, and keep your advertisers assured your magazine is reaching the right hands.

Let’s Publish.

Do you have a magazine project in the works? Contact us to see if we can be your ongoing partner for your publication. See you on the newsstands!