Embossing presses a design up into the material, and engraving cuts it away and leaves a recess. Cardstock and leather take embossing well, and so…
Spot UV coating puts a clear varnish on parts of a printed sheet and cures it under UV light. Those parts come out glossy, and…
Print files get specified in inches and PPI, usually 300 PPI. Web and app files get specified in plain pixel dimensions, and nobody asks what…
For work held at arm’s length, the default is 300 ppi at final size. The figure drops as viewing distance grows, which is how a…
Printers want a vector PDF first. EPS and AI sit right behind it. All three store a logo as paths and can carry CMYK or…
A printer’s raster image processor (RIP) never sees your screen. It reads the file and draws whatever is inside, and when layers or live transparency…
Most print jobs get their first look as a list of file names. Print file naming conventions are the agreed rules for which elements go…
Press plates never line up perfectly, and overprinting is what designers reach for when they don’t want white paper showing at the edges of objects.…
The difference is the ink. A spot color prints from one premixed ink. A process color gets built on the sheet from overlapping halftone dots…
Small black text with a faint white halo around it is the classic overprint mistake, and it usually traces back to a knockout nobody meant…
A file can look fine on screen and still come back from prepress with a note about ink limits. Nine times out of ten the…
A screen prints one ink. If a design uses five inks, the printer needs five screens, and each screen needs its own piece of artwork.…
Say a job already runs black plus one Pantone spot color. The headlines and logo use the spot, the body copy uses black, and the…
Calibrating a monitor for print takes a colorimeter or spectrophotometer and software that lets you set custom targets. The sensor reads the screen while the…
Send one image to two printers and you rarely get the same color back. The ICC file that records how a single printer, ink and…
Nobody wants to find out a brand red is off while the press is already running. Color proofing for print exists to catch that earlier.…
Photoshop has two menu paths for converting RGB to CMYK. Image > Mode > CMYK Color is the quick one. Edit > Convert to Profile…
Send a big black background to press as plain 100% K and it often comes back lighter than you expected. Rich black is the usual…
Something has to hold the pages together, and in print work that usually comes down to six methods: saddle stitch, perfect binding, case binding, spiral…
Wire staples through the fold suit booklets of 8 to about 64 pages. Thicker catalogs and manuals, and paperbacks that need a printed title, belong…
Slides laid out edge to edge lose a strip of text and images down the binding side once a coil goes through them. Walsworth (2022)…
A trim blade never lands on exactly the same line twice. That’s why print layouts carry a safe zone, a guide area inside the trim…
A print-ready file is built at the printer’s trim size plus bleed, in CMYK, with images at the resolution the printer names and fonts embedded…
To set up bleed in Illustrator, type the value into the Bleed fields in File > New or File > Document Setup, then extend every…
A printed piece only gets its final width and height once it has been cut from the larger press sheet. That finished measurement is the…
Open a print-ready PDF and you’ll usually find small lines sitting in each corner, well away from the artwork. Those are crop marks, and they…
Printers cut stacks of sheets with a blade, and the blade never lands in exactly the same spot twice. Bleed is the artwork you extend…
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