Pad Printing is sometimes also called “Tampo”, “Tampo Printing”, and/or “Transfer Pad Printing”. Pad printing is used for decorating products in many industries including medical, automotive, promotional, apparel, electronics, appliances, sports equipment and toys. It can also be used to deposit functional materials such as conductive inks, adhesives, dyes and lubricants.
Pad printing which is similar to lithography in that an image is transferred from one surface to another is comprised of of three major components: pad, ink and cliché. The cliché is made of a hard polymer or steel material and is configured with the desired design etched less than 1/1000th of an inch (25 micrometres) deep into it to act as a “reservoir” for the ink.
The pad, typically made from a silicone rubber, first presses against the surface of the cliché. The pad picks up the design and transfers it by pressing against the object. The unique properties of the silicone pad enable it to pick the image up from a flat plane and transfer it to a variety of surface (i.e. flat, cylindrical, spherical, compound angles, textures, concave surfaces, convex surfaces)
Examples of Pad Printing Application Logos and branding on corporate gifts and other products including calculators, balls (golf, softball, baseball), technological devices like calculators and flash drives, pens and much more!
Screenprinting, silkscreening, or serigraphy is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. A screenprint or serigraph is an image created using this technique. It began as an industrial technology, and was adopted by American graphic artists in the early 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is commonly used to print images on T-shirts, hats, CDs, DVDs, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and wood.
The Printer’s National Environmental Assistance Center says “Screen printing is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes.”Since rudimentary screen-printing materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used frequently in undergound settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screen prints has become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, and elsewhere.
Graphic screenprinting is widely used today to create many mass or large batch produced graphics, such as posters or display stands. Full color prints can be created by printing in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Screenprinting is often preferred over other processes such as dye sublimation or inkjet printing because of its low cost and ability to print on many types of media.
