
Custom Risograph Printing Services
Tickled by riso and want to see your design brought to life in this medium? Bromstad Printing Company offers custom printing services to the public, offering ten vibrant colors to choose from to transform your art from everyday to one-of-a-kind.
Ink Color Palette
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Black
#000000
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Federal Blue
#3d5588
288 U -
Teal
#00838a
321 U -
Seafoam
#62c2b1
570 U -
Sunflower Yellow
#ffb511
116 U -
Fluorescent Orange
#ff7477
805 U -
Bright Red
#f15060
185U
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Light Mauve
#e6b5c9
7430 U -
Plum
#845991
2603 U
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Metallic Gold
#ac936e
872 U*Specialty pricing

Bromstad Printing Co.
Ink Color Sampler Chart
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Why choose risograph?
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Unique
Risograph printing (or risography) makes a great alternative to traditional, commercial four-color process printing, or CMYK. Using strictly spot colors, the vibrancy of risograph ink is unmatched. Because of the quirks inherent to the medium, there is a playful, loose quality to a risograph print that can't be replicated with commercial printing methods.
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Affordable
For special projects like wedding invitations, letterpress printing—beautiful and tactile as it is—can quickly become unaffordable at higher quantities. But quantity is where risograph printing excells! Cost per piece drops dramatically when you print over 100 copies.
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Fun
Risography transforms a plain image into a textured, velvety, one-of-a-kind work of art. Variations in registration and surface imperfections lend an authenticity to the final product. Every copy is slightly different and thus unique. These are not flaws in risograph-land. It's part of the charm. Anyone who prints with a RISO duplicator will tell you, it's just kind of FUN!
Risograph Design Considerations
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Paper Size
11"x17" (ledger) is the largest size of paper we can print on, but we can also trim down to smaller sizes. The maxium image area we can safely print is 10.5"x16.5", which will give a 1/4" border all around the sheet. Need bleed? We will need to trim down to 10.25"x16.25".
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Roller Marks
When printing more than two colors, the same sheet is run through the press again. Because of this, the rollers that feed the paper through can sometimes pick up ink and leave track marks down the center of the page. The track marks can be minimized on our end with careful print planning and adequate dry-time, but be mindful of this possibility when designing and avoid heavy ink coverage in the center 1" of the sheet.
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Ink Density
Risograph printing uses rice paper stencils that have thousands of tiny holes burned to allow ink through. But if too much ink is printed over too big an area, the paper can stick to the drum and cause a jam. We can avoid this without drastically altering the look of the final artwork by taking the ink density down from 100% to 90%.
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Separations & Spot Colors
Risograph printing uses spot inks as opposed to RGB or CMYK process. Artwork should be created with spot color separations in mind as you would for silkscreen printing. This means for each color in your art, you should provide a grayscale image, where 100% black indicates maximum ink, and 0% (or white) indicates no ink coverage. Confused? Don't worry, we can help make separations from your artwork for a small fee.
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Trapping
Trapping is when one ink color slightly overlaps another ink color to hide misregistration between inks. Risograph registration is tricky, skew is almost unavoidable, and if there is no trapping, a sliver of paper may show between two colors where the layers are not quite lined up. Adding trapping to an image will keeps those little slivers of paper white from showing. This is especially important with thin linework.
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Layering Inks
Risograph inks are slightly transparent. While we have 10 colors to choose from, a design that incorporates layered inks can have an even greater color range. Seafoam + Sunflower Yellow = Bright Green. Sunflower Yellow + Bright Red = Orange. Ask about other combinations.
Ready to riso?
Custom Printing Examples









Risograph Printing Ideas
Posters & flyers
Art prints
Programs & menus
Newsletters & bulletins
Invitations
Stationery
Greeting Cards
Calendars
Merchandise tags
Wire-o wire binding
Saddle stitch zine & booklet binding