Print Design Tips for Beginners

                                                                                         

If you are a small business owner or a marketer who doesn’t know much about printing, and you need to work with a professional printer for your marketing materials, this article is for you. I’m going to give you a couple of print design tips that everyone should know who is going to pay a printer for their services. These will save you money and headache in the long run.

Trapping
Trapping is the process of making up for misregistration (colors that don’t align properly) on a printing press by printing small areas of overlapping color where objects meet. To make sure your colored materials come out without gaps in colors, you need to trap the colors.

To understand trapping you need to know how commercial printers print. When you print from your inkjet printer at home, all the color is applied at once. Each color ends up where you expected. On a commercial printing press, the colors are applied one at a time, not all at once, by four printing plates that each holds a different color.

Printing presses run at crazy high speeds, so sometimes the paper shifts slightly out of place, or the plates applying the ink shifts. When this happens, you end up with white space between two colors that should have been touching. Black letters on a green background will have a small white line around the letters. When this happens, your color is known to be out of register, or misregistered, meaning they didn’t align properly.

Trapping is usually pretty easy because many graphic design programs like Microsoft Publisher, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign all have trapping functions in which the program will take care of it for you. By overlapping the colors a bit where objects meet, you prevent any white space from creeping in.

Bleeding
Bleeding is similar to trapping, but applied to the physical edges of paper. Bleeding runs your ink color off the side of your page by 1/8 of an inch to make up for the cutting press not cutting your brochures or posters or other print materials correctly. Generally this is slight – you’ll just see a skinny line of white on one side of your paper, but it can look very unprofessional. By setting the bleed of your design to 1/8 of an inch, you can lessen the “damage” of the cutting press. It’s not really damaging the paper, but your print materials won’t look professional with a white sliver around the dark colored edge(s).

It’s easy to apply a bleed in the graphic design programs mentioned earlier, like InDesign – you just need to go to the Document Setup Dialog Box and find the Bleed menu and set it to 1/8 of an inch. (If your program uses millimeters, set it to 3mm to 5mm.)

By trapping and bleeding your design (sounds a little barbaric, doesn’t it?) you’ll do your part in ensuring your printer prints the best possible materials for your marketing campaign and other print materials.

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