What is your design team talking about? Print jargon buster

The world of print can be a minefield to navigate, even for experienced designers. From worrying about pagination for printing booklets, to making sure your colours and images are set correctly to CMYK, there’s a lot that can go wrong and you can easily end up with a print product that isn’t fit for purpose. 

Here are some really useful terms to help bridge the gap with your design team and make sure that printed booklets, flyers or posters come back from the printer looking sharp.

Bleed

Bleed is the border around a piece of print that gets trimmed off. This is to make sure that the artwork doesn’t have any messy white lines around the edge and that no important info is trimmed off, as the design ‘bleeds’ off the edge of the page. This is usually set to 3mm around the edge of the supplied artwork but can vary depending on the product.

CMYK

These are the three colours, plus black, that make up any printed design: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black). Every printed image, unless you’re using a different colour mode, uses a combination of these colours as a percentage. The higher the percentage used, the darker the colour. 

Crop Marks

These indicate to the printer where the artwork will be trimmed.

Finishing

There are many different finishes you can have on a printed product that are applied once the product has been printed. These can range from Spot UV, which applies a glossy, shiny finish to a particular area of the artwork, such as a title. Or foiling, which uses coloured heated foil that is transferred to the artwork and can add that extra luxurious feel.

Going to Press

This is just a fancy way of saying your image is going to be printed.

GSM

This stands for ‘Grams per Square Meter’ and is used to measure the weight of the paper. The bigger the number, the thicker and less flexible the stock. Thicker stocks are sometimes described as being higher quality or luxurious, but it isn’t always the case.

Ink Coverage

As mentioned before, printed images usually use CMYK. The total percentage of these colours used is your ink coverage. Most printers have a max that they go to, usually around 300%. If you go over this amount, problems can occur with the printed item, such as bruising and bleed-through, where there is too much ink on the paper. This can be variable depending on what material or surface you are printing on.

Pagination

This is the number of pages a particular product has. Usually written with the abbreviation ‘pp’ after a number, where ‘pp’ stands for “printed pages’. For example, a 16-page booklet would be a 16pp booklet. This is important for certain products like stapled or perfect-bound booklets, as they have to be printed in multiples of 4 and 2, respectively, due to the binding process.

Pantone

Pantone colours are an alternative to CMYK and make matching colours across different media, like web and print, easier. A lot of big brands have specific Pantone colours that they use to ensure consistency across different media. Think of them as being like colour swatches that you pick from when decorating your house. They often have a specific name and are famous for having a colour of the year. For example, this year’s is: PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer. 

DPI

This term is an abbreviation of ‘Dots per Inch’ and references the amount of coloured dots a printer can create over an inch. The bigger the number the higher resolution the image is. Usually, printed images are set to 300dpi, but some large format print like roller banners or large poster sizes can use 150dpi as they are intended to be viewed from further away. 

Proof

This is what your printer will send to you to check through before going to press. It’s important to look at this carefully, as things can be picked up that didn’t appear on your exported artwork. This proof will be as close in appearance to the final printed product.

Stock

This refers to the type of paper you are printing on and is a combination of the weight in GSM (as mentioned earlier), but also the type of paper, which is usually either uncoated, silk, matt or gloss.

Each have their own strengths and particular uses, for example, if you have really vibrant, colourful photographs that you’re printing, you might want them on gloss paper as it really makes colours stand out, whereas matt paper will make them appear duller, but is more suited to graphic, type-heavy artwork and is more tactile.

You should now be familiar with some of the print jargon used by designers and printers, so when you’re briefing in that next print job to a designer or booking one on yourself, it will be a stress-free experience!

Whether you need a new company brochure or marketing materials, if you need support with turning your ideas into reality, get in touch with our design team today, and we can work together to bring your printed products to life.