What this site is, and what it is for

What this site is

Fridge-Magnets.co.uk is a reference site about fridge magnets: what they are made of, how they are printed, and why some stick to a fridge door and others do not. There is no shop here, no product listings and no links to particular suppliers. The main guide starts from the material and the print process and works outward from there, because most questions about a fridge magnet, whether it is holding force, colour accuracy or lamination, trace back to a choice made at that stage.

Who the guides are written for

The guides are written for two readers who are asking related questions from different directions. One is a trade buyer specifying a printed run: a takeaway, a taxi firm, a school, an estate agent or a charity working out what to put on an order form. The other is someone ordering a custom or photo magnet for a wedding, a save-the-date or a gift, or checking why a magnet will not stay on the door, or looking after a souvenir collection. Both get the same technical answer: a magnet either holds to a given surface at a given thickness or it does not, and that is true whether the buyer is placing an order for two hundred or ordering one for themselves.

Getting in touch

Standards get updated, printers change their default specifications, and a figure that was accurate when a guide was written can go stale. If you spot something that needs correcting, or you have a question about a guide, write to fridge-magnets@contactforsales.com.

The guides on this site answer to two different readers, though the question underneath is usually the same one: will this magnet do what I need it to do? A trade buyer specifying a print run for a takeaway, a taxi firm, an estate agency or a school needs to know what to put on a job spec. A consumer choosing a custom or photo magnet for a wedding favour or a fridge full of family snaps needs to know the same things about thickness, material and print quality, just without the print-trade vocabulary attached to them.

The same material behaves the same way

A 0.6 mm flexible magnetic sheet does not know whether it is destined for a run of a few thousand menu magnets or a single photo magnet ordered as a gift. So a guide on how thick a magnet needs to be, or what makes it grip a particular fridge door, gives the trade buyer and the consumer the same answer. Where a term belongs to the print trade, such as bleed or safe area, it is explained in plain terms first and the trade name given afterwards, so a reader with no print background can follow the reasoning as easily as one ordering on behalf of a business.

One set of guides, not two

Because the underlying material and print process are the same for both, the guides are not split into a business version and a consumer version. The guides index lists them by subject, and a reader ordering one custom photo magnet can use the same page as a buyer specifying printed promotional magnets for a business. Anyone choosing a custom or photo magnet as a one-off gift will find the same specification questions answered, at the same level of detail, as a buyer placing a much larger order.

Every guide on this site names a specific standard, grade or figure: a British Standard number, a stainless steel grade, a thickness in millimetres, an ASA ruling. Those things are checkable, and they can also change or turn out to be wrong for a particular case. Where a reader spots an error, a standard that has moved on, or a gap in a guide, the route to flag it is by email at fridge-magnets@contactforsales.com.

What is useful to include

• The guide or page the query relates to
• The specific figure, term or claim in question
• Where relevant, the source that shows an update is needed, such as a revised standard or updated regulator guidance

The same address is the right one for general questions about a guide's content, for a topic that a reader thinks should be covered but is not yet, and for queries about the artwork size and resolution checker. The checker works from the numbers a reader enters and can be wrong if those numbers are wrong, so questions about a specific result are worth sending rather than guessing at.

Suggestions for new guides are also welcome, particularly where a reader has run into a fridge magnet question this site has not answered. The full list of what is currently covered is on the guides page.