As most of us have access to cheap printers these days, many
want to print stuff like business cards, greeting cards and other “collateral”
(as these are often referred to in the advertising industry). While clicking
“print” seems easy, there are a few more things to know and do in order to
create a professional looking result. Today, I will discuss some of these
techniques and processes.
While printing is not difficult, there is a difference in
designing graphics products that make a lot of difference between a “hobbyist”
level piece and what is more professional. The 4 main things that make the most
difference, in my opinion (*) are paper weight, cutting, crop-marks and Bleed
In this article, I will talk mostly about business cards, as
many people need to print just a handful, while most printing shops would only
do a minimum of 100, which many people won’t want to waste money on.
* I myself am NOT a professional graphics designer, but I
lived with one for two decades and picked up a skill or two.
Paper Weight
Paper weight refers to the thickness of the paper you print
on, and using the right one makes a lot of difference. The main challenge is
that in America, paper weight is calculated in a way that’s somewhat
convoluted, and often times it’s hard to find the right one, or even understand
what the number on the packaging means. For example, business cards are printed
on fairly thick paper, but there’s no paper in office supply stores that says
“Business card paper”. In Europe, paper is labeled almost universally, so if
you buy “170 GSM”, or close to it, you can know for sure it’s a fit. In
America, the closest paper you can easily find to that is labeled “poster
board”. You could also get “65 lb Cover” or “90 lb Index”, and if you want even
thicker, you could get “110 lb Index”, “80 lb Cover” or “100 lb Cover”. In this
weird labeling system, “Cover” and “index” refer to other properties of the
paper, rather than it’s thickness, and so “100 lb cover” is actually thicker
than “110 lb index” (in Europe, 110 lb index would be labeled “200 gsm” and 100
lb cover “275 gsm”, which much more clearly illustrates the thickness).
This also means that many times, you might find yourself
staring at bundles of paper in the store, unsure what the thickness ACTUALLY is
(if the package is sealed, that is). Also, you might find that certain paper
types come in sizes that won’t match what you want to do. For example, poster
board is a very available and affordable paper for postcards, greeting cards and
business cards, but it comes in large format that you can’t feed into your
printer. For me, almost every print I do other than simple copy-paper is done
on poster board, and to get around the size issue, I buy the big sheets (about
$1 in most office/craft stores, and 2 for 1$ at the Dollar Tree) and then cut
them into “Letter” size manually. This way I get 12 sheets for 1 dollar (from
the Dollar tree), and since I can print 10 business cards on one sheet, that
dollar yields 120 cards (not including ink, of course). If I were doing
greeting cards, the common folded-style 5x7 card would require a 7”x10”
surface, which fits on one “letter” size sheet, giving me 12 cards for 1$. Both
of these are good deals for small-scale production.
Poster board also comes in additional colors, which can be
nice for some designs that aren’t based on white. A close option to that is
photo paper, which isn’t quite as thick, but it’s glossy, fairly affordable,
and can be found pre-cut to letter-size, so you can jump in and print without
much trouble and cutting.
When printing at home, we would usually have the paper
larger than what we’re printing. Whether it’s a greeting card that needs to be
trimmed down to 7x10 or business cards that need to be cut into individuals, we
would need to cut it down, and that is more complex than it looks. Sure, you
can use simple household scissors to cut it, but very few people can hold
scissors straight enough to get that “professional” look. Even if you cut along
the line (which you shouldn’t…but we’ll get to that), it’s just not feasible to
keep it perfectly straight. The answer is to use a box-cutter (a.k.a. Snap
Knife) and ruler to do the cutting, on a cutting board. This way, the ruler
helps you keep a straight line…but that’s not always that simple either.
Cutting paper
First lesson in cutting is getting the right ruler. Wood
rulers are not suitable, as the blade can cut into them instead of along them.
Metal rulers are better, but they are often thin, meaning there’s a risk of the
blade slipping over their edge and cutting into YOUR fingers. Plastic rulers
are also soft and can be accidentally cut-into by the blade. I recommend PCB
ruler (a.k.a Circuit Board ruler). These are mostly made to be decorative and
cool, but they are also very suitable for this purpose as they are both thick,
and resistant to cutting. These can be found on eBay. Another option is to use
thick Acrylic, which can be found at plastic stores. Yet another option is to
take a simple and thin metal ruler, and just stick two of these on top of each
other with glue. Either way, make sure your ruler is long enough. It’s ideal
for it to be larger than the paper you’re cutting, but a 12” ruler that you
move during the cut will do the job…but if you go to short (like a 6” ruler), you’ll
be moving it too much and risk getting lines that aren’t straight. If you are
very new to using a snap-knife, I might also suggest wearing a protective glove
on the hand that holds the ruler. A Thick leather glove, or fish-handling glove
would be ideal, as they are designed to stop a blade.
As for the knife – box cutters come in either “small” or
“big”, and I recommend the small, as it gives you finer control. However, it’s
also important to get replacement blades and replace them often. A dull
knife seem less dangerous, but it’s actually is more so, because the dullness
would drive us to put more pressure on it, which increases the chance of it
breaking and flying somewhere, or causing it to slip and cut your fingers. Box
cutters usually have blades that can be trimmed, thus get a new cutting point without
replacing the whole blade…but even replacing the whole blade would only cost
about 10 cents, so that too can be done without spending too much. I recommend
snapping the blade for a new point every 100 cuts or so and don’t cheap
out…that’s where people lose fingers. Another reason to keep the edge sharp and
new is that a dull edge might tear your paper instead of cutting it, resulting
in ugly work that’s hard to recover.
Next, it’s important to cut on a good surface. You don’t
want to do this on your table, as it would ruin it, but there are plenty of
cutting board options. Office supply stores have “self healing” boards made of
special rubber that’s hard, but can “take” a knife. A kitchen cutting board is
another option, but those are usually both too small, and if you grab one from
your own kitchen, it probably has a lot of “wounds”, making for a less smooth
cut. It could also dirty your paper if it’s not perfectly clean. There are
plenty of glass-based cutting boards, but I don’t recommend those, as they put
a lot of wear on the blade, and also tend to be slippery for the knife, making
it more risky.
When cutting, it’s important to put pressure on the knife,
but not TOO much pressure. It’s common for people to try to stack sheets, and
cut many together, but that’s once-again where fingers get slices, and paper
gets cut crocked. I suggest putting a low amount of pressure, to only cut one
or two layers, and passing the knife over it over-and-over to cut deeper and
deeper. When doing so, make sure you are STANDING and not sitting down. Our
hands aren’t built to apply pressure sideways, so standing above your surface
will get much better and more reliable results.
Crop Marks
Since we will be printing an image that’s smaller than the
paper, we would need to trim it to size, and thus need to know where to cut.
The beginner way of doing this is by printing the image with a border around
it, and then cutting along the border. However, this is suboptimal, as we risk
having the border be visible in the result (unless the design is supposed to
have it, of course). The answer to this is using “crop marks”. Crop marks are
cross-like graphics that are placed on the image’s sides, but outside the usable
graphics area. Then, we would place the ruler on the marks and cut along it.
Professional design software includes built-in functions for
crop marks, but they are not that hard to do manually. If your graphics
software supports layers, then it’s fairly easy:
1.
Resize your project “paper
size” to be about 1/8” larger on each side (if working at 300 DPI, that’s about
37 pixels)
2.
Create another layer above
the current one
3.
Use the pen/line tool with
a line thickness of “1” (pixel) to draw lines across the image and around it,
like so:
(I’m actually using a 4 pixel line here, to make it easier to see)
4.
Use the select tool
to select a few pixels outside the frame, and delete it, thus leaving
just partial crosses at each corner:
5.
You can now merge-down the
layer, if you like, or if you need to export it to JPG or PNG
If you are planning on printing multiple copies of the same
graphics on a page, then you would do similarly, but also put in lines
in-between the copies, and delete them the same way:
If your graphics software does not support layers, then
you’d be better off switching to something better (even the free Paint.NET has
support for layers). If there’s no option, then you can draw the marks manually
outside the area with layering, but that’s a lot more work, and would
potentially be less accurate.
One caveat of crop marks is that they do take a bit of
space, thus limiting you from using the entirety of the paper you’re printing
on, but that’s a small price to pay, in my opinion. If you do this, you will
notice how your results are more accurate and professional looking right away!
Bleed
Another challenge with printing is that we typically use
white paper, while the print may have a different colored background. When we
cut a print to size, even if do it very accurately, there’s always a risk of
having a thin white line at the edge, and this is where the concept of Bleed
comes in.
Bleed is an adjustment in the design of the graphics that
extends beyond the border of the target cut. This way, even if the cut is not
perfectly accurate, it will still be in the graphics and not on the background,
thus looking more professional.
Bleed needs to be part of the design process, and it
basically means doing the graphics so that they go outside the target by 30-50
pixels. If we are working with an existing design, then it’s usually possible
to simply replicate the last few pixels of the graphics (this is less easy if
the graphics is very complex or patterned). Naturally, we would also need to
adjust the Crop Marks to align to the original size. This is how this could
look like:
As you may notice, the top-left crop marks are not highly
visible in this example, because the graphics is red. In some situations, it
might be better to use white or yellow crop-marks, to make then stand-out
better. You may also notice that the graphics are imperfect on the left and top
sides, as I replicated the pixels and the bubbles don’t align. This could be
fixed with a bit more work (which I do with real designs), but I intentionally
left it here like this to show the “down and dirty” way. Since the bleed would
be almost completely (depending on how accurate you cut) outside the result,
then it usually doesn’t really matter if it’s perfect or not.
