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Majari Picks: Web-of-the-Month is Inkers.biz.

Ink? It is in your everyday life, almost in every aspect of our activity. In the morning we read our newspaper and get to school bringing all our books. In the afternoon we jot things down on our agenda and leave sticky notes to friends. At night we print a lot of school assignments from our computer. Ink is everywhere. What is ink?

An ink is a liquid containing various pigments (organic and inorganic) and/or dyes used for coloring a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush or quill. Thicker inks, in paste form, are used extensively in letterpress and lithographic printing. Generally, an ink consists of two components, the pigment and/or dye and the vehicle/solvent.

According to its purposes, ink is categorized into four types: writing ink, drawing ink, printing ink, and invisible ink. One of the most common ink type is printing ink, a mixture of dispersed pigment in a carrier media that forms liquid or gel which can be pressed and dried on a media. Printing inks are further broken down into two subclasses: ink for conventional printing, in which a mechanical plate comes in contact with or transfers an image to the paper or object being printed on; and ink for digital non-impact printing, which includes inkjet cartridges and electrophotographic technologies.

Printing Ink

Linseed oil, soybean oil, and heavy petroleum distillate, combined with organic pigments, are primary raw materials for solvent (called the vehicle) in color printing ink production. The pigments are made up of salts of multi-ring nitrogen-containing compounds (dyes), for example: yellow lake, peacock blue, phthalocyanine green, and diarylide orange. Inorganic pigments also are used in printing inks to a lesser extent. Some examples are chrome green (Cr₂O₃), Prussian blue (Fe₄[Fe(CN)₆]₃), cadmium yellow (CdS), and molybdate orange (a mix of lead chromate, molybdate, and sulfate).

Carbon black is the raw material for black ink. White pigments, such as titanium dioxide, are used either by themselves or to adjust characteristics of color inks. Inks also contain additives such as waxes, lubricants, surfactants, and drying agents to aid printing and to impart any desired special characteristics.

So what does the future hold for ink? Would ink someday become a history? Although there is a big tendency in people’s everyday life to use electronic devices instead of paper, the great paperless society hasn’t begun to show itself yet–people simply like paper too much. And as long as there’s paper, then there must be ink.