When considering specific options for your next printing project it helps to have a good understanding of the different types of printing available and how new technology is helping to make printing and marketing communications more effective and more cost-efficient. There are five printing methods that use plates or some other form of image carrier— lithography, flexography, gravure, screen printing, and letterpress. The three most commonly used commercial printing processes are sheet-fed offset, web offset and digital. Each of these has an important niche, with inherent advantages and disadvantages.

Sheet-fed offset printing is a widely used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface in one to six colors. Offset printing is the most common form of high volume commercial printing such as brochures, direct mailers and product sheets due to advantages in quality and efficiency in high volume jobs. While modern digital presses are getting closer to the cost/benefit of offset for high-quality work, they have not yet been able to compete with the sheer efficiency nor final quality that an offset press can produce. Furthermore, most modern offset presses are using computer to plate systems (Direct-to-Plate or DTP) as opposed to the older computer to film workflows, which further increases their quality.