Hi everybody,
I'm working on putting together a fundraising campaign for Ventura County Ry. 2's 1472-day inspection at the Southern California Railway Museum (formerly the Orange Empire Railway Museum). As a thank you gift for one of the giving levels, I'd like to give donors a boxed set of notecards featuring an assortment of pictures of the locomotive. I'm thinking something along the lines of the boxed notecard sets that art museums sell in their gift shops that feature images of paintings in the museum's collection.

We'd likely be ordering 50-200 sets. Can anybody recommend a company that does that sort of work? Anybody have any experience or advice along those lines?

Thanks a lot!

I've done post cards, greeting cards, you name it. For special, high quality printing, I use a select group of local independent printers here in Northeast Ohio. They know their capabilities, equipment and paper types and sizes and can answer any questions and give good advice. I've found that using chain store printers can be a crap shoot when high quality counts.

If you do your own artwork, the color space needs to be in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), not RGB (red, green, blue) like most desktop programs like Microsoft Publisher use. I work with Adobe Illustrator and/or inDesign - they're "native" in CMYK. Converting a file from RGB to CMYK usually doesn't give predictable results once it hits the printer. The output should be a preflighted PDF-X file which is a commercial printing industry standard.

For a small quantity like you're looking at, digital printing is the way to go. Once you get to around 1,000+ pieces, offset printing may save a few bucks.

That's the overview. I can answer questions if you have them.