Corporate Printers Ltd.

Design Considerations for Your Printing Project

Whether you are designing your project in concept sketches only or doing full layouts via desktop publishing or mechanicals, here are some issues to consider before finalizing your design.

Final Trim Size

Setting prepress charges aside, printing cost basically is a combination of the length of time a project is on the press, the cost of paper, and the trimming and bindery work involved. Sometimes a small adjustment in the final trim size of a project can save you money in the final printing. See details here.

Imagable Area

Although a press may be able to run a specific size of paper, sometimes it cannot print too close to the edge of the sheet. "Grippers," for example, are metal "fingers" that grab the sheet by one side and hold it on the impression drum as it passes through the press. Obviously nothing can print on that edge. If your design is too close to the edges of a particular stock size, it may have to run on larger stock and a larger press.

Ink Coverage

Some small runs are cheaper to run on a smaller press, saving you money, but if you design big solids into such a project, problems in ghosting (variations in density of printed solids caused by adjacent non-image areas on the same sheet) may require a more expensive run on a bigger press.

Registration

Running a two-color job on a smaller press can sometimes create difficulties in getting colors to trap (allowing enough image for one color to meet another without any paper showing through between). A trap, a spreading or "fattening" of one or more of the color shapes, is normally done in prepress to insure ink fit. This can only be done within certain tolerances before it becomes visible in the final piece, and there are certain critical trap situations that require the dimensional stability of larger sheet sizes and higher accuracy of a bigger press.

Design problems out of Your Project

Sometimes a creative idea can be implemented in a way that would be easier and less expensive to print. For example, it's a neat and unique idea to print a two-color job in PMS colors and create screen tints that overprint to create a third color. In reality, there is no way to proof such a job other than creating the films and plates and putting it on the press. The results might be unpredictable or undesirable. Such a project would be less expensive to run as a three-color job where the third color you want has been identified by a PMS color guide and can be matched precisely