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Printing Industry Exchange (printindustry.com) is pleased to have Steven Waxman writing and managing the Printing Industry Blog. As a printing consultant, Steven teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, brokers printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the printing industry for thirty-three years working as a writer, editor, print buyer, photographer, graphic designer, art director, and production manager.

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Commercial Printing: Printing Your Driver’s License

I spent three hours in the Maryland Department of Transportation today (mostly waiting) to renew my driver’s license. As a student of commercial printing with time on my hands, I took the opportunity to read the driver’s license replacement brochure to see what I was getting.

Needless to say, when I compared the new design to the one I had had for the past seven years, I was struck by the complexity of the custom printing. The brochure I was reading launched my education into new digital printing methods for drivers’ licenses.

Qualities/Attributes of the Card

First of all, it was clear to me that this could have been any type of card, including a credit card or medical card. The specific custom printing techniques and the substrate of the card itself could ostensibly be useful for all card printing.

Moreover, a few more things were immediately evident.

The card is rigid and durable. I know because I’ve had my current driver’s license for seven years, and everything is still readable. It’s scratched up a bit, but it has lasted. The brochure describes the card as having a “polycarbonate card body” that is “more durable, secure, and tamper resistant” (“Maryland Protected and Proud” brochure).

There was a lot of information encoded in my prior driver’s license, as evidenced by a single two-dimensional code. On both my prior license and the new one there is an “identity barcode” composed not of vertical lines (as with a UPC code or a US Postal barcode) but a pattern of tiny squares (not unlike pixels on a computer screen). These tiny squares link up to create patterns within a rectangle approximately 2” wide by 3/4” high.

This pattern, which I Googled online and found to be a PDF-417 (I believe), reminded me of a QR Code (quick response code).

The key here is that such a code can contain a wealth of information about the individual driver. Presumably this can be used as a repository for information the Maryland Department of Transportation needs for its operations but also as a means for confirming the identity of the card holder.

Based on my understanding of the process, such a code is digitally generated from digital data. And in addition to the identity code, the new drivers’ licenses described in the brochure have an “inventory control number” and accompanying barcode (vertical lines, in contrast to the 2D identity barcode). Again, I assume this is digitally generated, in this case just from the unique control number.

When I compare this card (I actually just found my fiancee’s driver’s license as well, and this matches the brochure image in every detail) to a credit card, it seems to have much more detailed image content. Plus, it has no chip (at least no chip recognizable by the universally accepted “chip logo”).

At the top right of my fiancee’s driver’s license is a small image of my fiancee. When I tilt the card vertically (back and forth), the image changes to her birthdate. So, this means the Maryland Department of Transportation has printed a “lenticular image” (composed of incredibly small plastic lenses that present two images when tilted).

From what I see (and since I know that utilitarian goals trump aesthetics in such a card), the purpose of the lenticular image is to make counterfeiting the driver’s license that much more difficult–as a deterrent to identity theft.

If you run your fingers over my fiancee’s driver’s license, you will notice that some of the lettering is raised. The brochure describes this as “tactile text” or “laser engraving on the card … [that] raises the print making it difficult to tamper or modify” (“Maryland Protected and Proud” brochure).

On the back of the card is a miniature 4-color image of my fiancee (noted in the MDOT brochure as “another barrier against fraud”). There is also a partial 4-color image of what looks like a statehouse (apparently the Annapolis, Maryland, statehouse). The center of the building is in color (a yellow) and the left and right sides of the statehouse are black ink only. There is a gradual shift (like a vignette) from the black to the yellow and back to the black. The brochure refers to this as “rainbow printing.” My assumption is that it is also an anti-counterfeiting measure.

Over the front of my fiancee’s driver’s license seems to be a textured coating. The front of the card is a little glossier than the back, and there is the word “Maryland” and equal-armed crosses from the Maryland flag produced with texture but otherwise invisible (as a laminate or other coating might be).

Goals of These Various Attributes of the Driver’s License

Identity Protection

In its own way, this driver’s license reminds me of some of the new larger-dollar-denomination bills in the US currency, with their holograms, metallic strips, and contrasting-color threads. In both cases, it seems that the goal is to deter fraud. Since there are an increasing number of brilliant but immoral people stealing identities, the state governments need to work harder and harder each year to develop commercial printing techniques to thwart such theft. A close observation of the driver’s license reveals many of these.

Durability

Between the coating on the front of my fiancee’s driver’s license and the thickness and overall strength of the polycarbonate card substrate, it is clear that durability is of paramount importance. The card must be readable in the seventh year of its existence as well as the first. None of the custom printing can be allowed to degrade as the license rubs against other cards in one’s wallet.

Infinitely Variable Data Storage

Unlike most other cards (with the possible exception of a credit card), the driver’s license must contain a wealth of information on only one person. This makes it an ideal candidate for digital commercial printing. No analog process could produce such infinite variability for any reasonable price.

So How Is It Done?

I went online to research the process for printing a driver’s license. I also looked closely at my fiancee’s license with a 12-power printer’s loupe. And I reread the MDOT brochure.

Through a loupe the image appears to contain the minuscule spots of inkjet printing, particularly visible in the color builds of the typescript. The dot pattern in the halftones is not the regular line upon line of halftone dots I see in laser printing. These dots are random, like those of FM screening or stochastic printing. So my educated guess at this point would be that some kind of inkjet printing process was used.

The brochure also mentions laser engraving (as opposed to laser printing) for some of the typescript. So I’m assuming some kind of burning process with a laser was used during printing.

For protection, there seems to be some kind of gloss coating over the polycarbonate card substrate. Given the images I found online of the driver’s license printers, my educated guess would be that they incorporate some sort of heated lamination process following the application of liquid ink (unless it really is a toner-based process, which I doubt).

Since dye sublimation would be the third digital custom printing option, I looked for any indication of changes in color tones not achieved with different sized halftone dots. This is because to the best of my understanding you can actually create different shades of a color with continuous tones using dye sublimation technology. Therefore, I’d assume that this printing process is either inkjet–perhaps UV inkjet (first guess)–or laser printing (second guess).

What You Can Learn From This Case Study

I personally think that card printing not only is a lucrative field currently but that it will only continue to grow. After all, companies and governments have both the desire and the technology required to parse vast amounts of data and to encode it on cards used to identify the holder. This may be for medical reasons (medical cards). It may be for carrying or transferring money (credit and debit cards). Or it may be for identification purposes (drivers’ licenses).

Until all of this information can be biometrically held (fingerprint or retina scan) or held on chips inserted into people (as they are now inserted into rescue animals at the pound), designers and printers will have an increasingly lucrative market in printed plastic cards.

Moreover, this will be a recurring purchase. As the technology improves, people will need new cards. New digital tricks will be invented to foil identity thieves, and this will require replacement cards made with all manner of 2D and 3D commercial printing techniques.

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