Regardless of where you purchase your mouse pads, the following information
is good to know and can help you avoid problems you might otherwise
create unknowingly.  Always call us before getting too deep into your art
design and we will offer guidance at no charge.  We also offer design
layout at no extra charge, which includes typesetting and placement
of supplied graphics.

Pad Quality

1. At it's most basic form, blank un-printed mouse pads ARE NOT 
created equal.  First, there are only 3 rubber manufacturers in the US that create
the raw open cell rubber and laminate the fabric for the soft top mouse pads.
One of these manufactures is clearly the best, and we purchase ONLY their rubber
stock.  For the soft top pads, ours don't suffer from the fabric peeling as other 
lower grade products do.
  

2. Then there is the cutting quality.  Our pads are cut only one layer thick.  
If you try save time and cut through more than one layer on a thick mouse 
pad, you'll get distortions and even some tearing.  MANY manufacturers do this.  
Our mouse pads are always cut properly.  Also,  the cutting blades are 
rotated and sharpened continually to maintain the cleanest mouse pad edges
on both the soft tops and the hard top mouse pads.  There are more factors to 
achieving the quality we insist on, but allow us some trade secrets!


Print Quality

1. This is what separates the men from the boys!  It is important for ANYONE
getting ready to order mouse pads to understand the following information,
so please continue reading.  Printing on soft top mouse pads is done with a 
"sublimation transfer"  Sublimation is a dye that can be heat transferred 
effectively to a polyester substrate, such as a mouse pad and other items, 
too. (Snowboards, wet suits, cycling jerseys, etc...)  You cannot feel the
print, as it completely penetrates the fabric fibers of the substrate.  So the 
process is this: dye printed to paper, then paper placed on the mouse pad and
heated under pressure to get the image permanently embedded in the mousepad.  
The first issue I'll cover is the reality of "dot gain".  The sublimation dye 
can reproduce graphics very vibrantly and sensitively if you take into 
account the "dot gain", meaning the "growing" of the printed dot patterns 
during the heating process.  If you took a photo of the night sky with all of 
its stars, you'd find little evidence of the stars when you printed a sublimation 
mouse pad UNLESS you prepared the art properly.  Since we always start
with a white mouse pad, the stars are actually the mouse pad showing
through.  The heavy black background overcomes the stars. We have done many 
space scenes and starry skied graphics, and in some cases we literally had 
to enlarge the stars one by one!  Dot gain will also gobble up fine text that is 
reversed out of a dark background.  In those cases, you'd need to use the
bold version of the text or add an outline to thicken.  Sometimes you must 
even increase the point size of the text.  Please keep this in mind when you
design your graphic.  Text generally should be 12pt bold for reversing 
out of a dark background, i.e.: white text in a black box.

2. Related to dot gain is the subject of color balancing.  It takes many years
of experience to get sublimation dye to balance properly.  Any errors are 
amplified due to "dot gain" and this makes it the most difficult style of
printing to color balance for.  If not done properly, you'll get wildly different
results than what you'd want, i.e.: blues gone green, tans gone anything but
tan, skies looking purple, not blue, skin tone gone green or red, and on and on.
Also, it is important to know that there is no true cyan (one of the colors used
to create full-color prints).  The dye used to create cyan is closer to a royal 
blue.  You can still get very high quality full-color work from these dyes, BUT,
do not assign cyan and expect to get it.  It just doesn't exist.  There are only 
so many elements that can be used to create color for sublimation dye, and
so far, something to create cyan has not been discovered yet!  Ask us for
samples of our work to see the state-of-the art in sublimation printing.  We
can let you know if you are creating something beyond the abilities of sublimation
dye printing.  It is rarely the case that we can't get a great print of what
you've created or what we may create together, but we'll let you know of
potential problems and suggest doing a full production proof where it is 
warranted.

3.  Sublimation dye requires both a great press operator, and a very
expensive and WELL MAINTAINED PRESS, such as we use. In our case
it is a million dollar Heidelberg 4-color offset printing press, and  
pressman who continually heat-presses samples as they are running the job 
to ensure everything is looking as it should.  You see, the transfers don't 
show the color properly until they have been heat activated!  There just 
aren't many places in the country that have our winning combination:
-16 years experience offset printing and flexo-printing (plastic packaging)
-10 years experience with intensive sublimation dye printing
-plus the absolute best equipment to give you what you want: 
the finest quality mouse pad at the best possible price.