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Almost all our products are digital .pdf files. In theory, all you need to do is open that file (in any PDF viewer, your browser, whatever), connect to a printer, and find the “Print” button.

But we get it—printing is expensive! Printing our materials for an entire classroom worth of kids, in color, is even more expensive! We try to pack as much value as possible into every product, which means they often near 20 or even 30 pages of unique content.

Below is a list of simple tips and tricks to reduce the cost of printing our materials, and the impact on the environment by doing so.

Color or Grayscale?

Our products are minimalist at their core: most of the material is grayscale, but there are hints of color to make it look a bit more varied and enticing.

This means that, in most cases, you can simply print the PDF in black and white (even if it originally included color!) and you’ll be fine.

  • There are cheap printers that only do grayscale in the first place. If you connect one of those, it will automatically convert for you.
  • Most PDF viewers have an option to print black-and-white. (For example, Firefox gives you a “Color Mode” option in the print dialog. Adobe Acrobat has a “Print in grayscale” checkbox near the top.)

If color is actually necessary, this fact is listed on the product page (alongside all other metadata such as language, player count, etcetera). For example, an escape room experience might have one or two puzzles that rely on recognizing or matching colors.

Even then, you can always decide to simply skip those parts. If a puzzle pack contains one puzzle that needs color, the product has to be marked as such, but you can also simply ignore that one puzzle and print the others in grayscale.

Multiple Pages on One Page

This is a simple solution that many people don’t even consider!

For clarity and simplicity, it’s standard to follow the mantra “one thing on one page”. If we create a puzzle pack, we add one unique puzzle per page, even if that means the puzzle is quite large and there’s a lot of whitespace left. Because adding multiple distinct things on the same page makes things incredibly messy and cluttered.

But often it’s perfectly fine to simply print two pages on one page. (In effect, if the original PDF were A4 format, you now have 2 A5’s on one A4.)

  • Firefox has a “Pages per Sheet” option in the print dialog. This even allows 3 or more sheets on a single page, though you obviously need to be wary of things becoming too small or illegible.
  • Adobe Acrobat has this same “Pages per Sheet” option.
  • Other software often calls this specific situation—turning a single page into two half pages—a “booklet” or similar.

We personally like things to be big, bold, clear and simple. This means our materials (often) easily have large enough print to apply this technique and still get very legible materials in return.

All Pages or Selective?

Of course, an even more effective method is to simply not print some pages at all.

The first page of most materials is a “cover page” that looks nice and explains some things, but doesn’t need to be printed.

Similarly, most of our materials ramp up difficulty. The first few puzzles or exercises are the easiest, then we add a twist to make it harder, and so forth until the final exercises that are clearly on a new level. It’s perfectly reasonable to only print the “easy puzzles”, for example, and wait with printing the “harder versions” until your Apprentice is ready. (Or, conversely, if your Apprentice has already learned the easy skills, you can skip those and immediately jump to something more to their level.)

  • The hard way to do this would be to actually edit the PDF and remove the pages you don’t want.
  • The easier way is to, again, change settings in the print dialog.
    • Most of them have a box for “Pages” or “Pages Included”.
    • You can type the actual numbers of the pages to include. (1,2,4 would print page 1, 2, and 4.)
    • Or you can even type ranges (5-7 would only print pages 5,6 and 7)

It can be tempting to just press the big red button and “print it all”, because who knows what part of the materials you end up liking the most? But it can save a lot of paper, ink and effort if you’re selective with the part of the material you want to engage with this time.

Even More Customization

Most of our PDFs are designed and exported to minimize file size. That means elements are not “baked-in” (like every page is just one huge image), but use native PDF capabilities to draw every single part.

You can see it as the difference between having an actual ebook (with native, editable, searchable text) or merely having screenshots of a book (a PDF with fixed, large images only).

Besides keeping down file size tremendously, this also gives you the option to edit it! If you have a PDF editor—such as the one by Adobe, the inventor of the .pdf format—you can select, remove, and change elements. More fine-grained changes might be hard or impossible, but general light editing to suit your needs should be possible.

We use our Sneakpeeks category to actually sell the source files behind successful products. This divulges all secrets and obviously allows way more customization, at the cost of requiring you to have the right software and deep computer knowledge.

REMARK! We briefly considered bundling this source with the actual product, but this was a mess. Most people are only interested in the product itself, while adding the source files bloated the price and the files you needed to download/sift through. Every product’s source can eventually be found in Sneakpeeks, but there’s a considerable delay on that as we want to bundle things and ensure no private files are accidentally leaked.

What We Offer

As stated, we already design our materials to be efficient and minimalist. Only some sprinkles of color where absolutely needed, no fluff or bloat. Even so, there are many situations where having more pages or more colors is the choice we make (for whatever reasons). For that reason,

  • The color property on product pages shows if a product requires printing in color. (If not visible, it means it does not by default.)
  • Products that become too large are usually split into multiple smaller, more focused ones. For example, many of our “Busy Books” around certain themes or holidays are cut into unique ones per level. As such, if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the first place, you might simply be looking at the wrong variant of the thing.
  • Products might deliver two files: one in full color, one in simplified grayscale. This is not always possible, or preferable, but some of our systems/workflows can easily support creating two versions, and in that case we want to give you that choice.

This article, thus far, has only given (technical) tips on how to reduce printing costs and paper waste.

Let us end by giving a few (practical) tips about actual usage of the things you printed.

  • Ease of use is a big deal. If at all possible, keep the “pack” together and orderly. Especially if parts had to be cut out and are now loose! Once it becomes a mess, or you might be missing parts, or it becomes a burden to carry it around … you’re likely to stop using the material as it’s too annoying.
  • All our materials are English, but being language-independent is one of our core pillars. Almost everything is explained with images too, and the English is kept to one or two short sentences. You can absolutely use our materials in other languages, as long as the Guardian (or someone) can translate the English bits.
  • Many materials are used by writing on them, cutting parts out, or even folding. In fact, we jokingly call our games and exercises “joyously destructable”. As such, don’t be too hesitant to print things at low quality or multiple sheets per page and consider them “throwaway pages”—as opposed to printing one of our packs in beautiful color and sadly seeing your Apprentices absolutely destroy that ;) We really only recommend “nice printing” on our board games, as they’re supposed to last and be reused a lot.
  • As stated, many materials have a bit of a difficulty ramp, but many also don’t. In most cases, there is no explicit order to the pages. We very much encourage just flipping through the material and seeing what you want to do next, or what catches your eye. In our experience, forcing Apprentices to start at page 1 and work linearly, at all costs, is a very bad idea. Even if they get stuck because they started on page 5 and missed some earlier info, that is fine. Learning happens because of getting stuck; no learning happens if someone has no motivation to engage with material in the first place.