Paper, and everything done after printing

Paper is a design material

Two jobs printed identically on different stocks are different objects. Knowing the vocabulary lets you specify rather than accept.

Weight is grammage, in grams per square metre. Rough anchors: ordinary copier paper 80 gsm; a good letterhead 100 to 120 gsm; a leaflet 130 to 170 gsm; a visiting card 300 to 350 gsm; a folder 350 gsm plus.

Weight is not thickness. Bulk varies by stock, which is why the spine calculation in the previous module needs a caliper from the printer rather than a gsm figure.

Surface decides how ink sits:

• Coated art, gloss or matt: a clay coating holds ink on the surface. Sharp images, strong colour, larger gamut, low dot gain. What most brochures are printed on.
• Uncoated: ink soaks in. Softer image, muted colour, 20 to 25% dot gain, lovely to write on and to hold. Letterheads, forms, literary books.
• Maplitho: the uncoated wood-free paper that runs an enormous share of Indian commercial and book printing.
• Newsprint: cheap, absorbent, grey, and a completely different set of numbers.
• Textured, laid, recycled: specify by sample, not by name, because names vary by mill.

Grain direction is the direction the fibres lie. Paper folds cleanly along the grain and cracks across it, and a folded job with the grain running the wrong way produces a ragged, cracked fold on every copy. Tell the printer where the folds are; they choose the grain.

Finishing, and what each one demands of your file

Lamination: a plastic film over the sheet. Gloss, matt or soft-touch. Adds durability and stiffness, and shifts colour slightly: matt lamination noticeably dulls and darkens. If colour is critical, ask to see a laminated sample.

Spot UV: a glossy varnish on selected areas only. Needs a separate spot colour layer in your file, usually named SpotUV, containing solid shapes where the varnish goes, set to overprint. Keep it at 100% of a spot; it is a presence-or-absence mask, not a tint.

Foiling: metallic foil pressed on with a heated die. Same idea: a separate spot layer, solid shapes, named Foil. Fine detail and small type do not foil well; ask for a minimum stroke width.

Embossing and debossing: raised or recessed. Another separate layer. Remember from the logo module that a mark distinguished only by colour disappears entirely here.

Die-cutting: a shaped cut. Supply the die-line as a separate spot-coloured layer, named Dieline or CutContour, drawn as thin outlines with no fill, and set to overprint so it does not knock out the artwork beneath.

Creasing, perforating and folding: usually shown on the same technical layer as the die-line, with different spot names (Crease, Perf) so the finisher can separate them.

Numbering, scoring, round-cornering, drilling, padding, gumming: all normal, all cheap, and all things to ask about rather than to discover.

The technical-layer convention

Every one of the above shares a pattern, and if you learn it once you can prepare any of them:

1. Put the marks on their own layer, above the artwork.
2. Colour them with a named spot swatch: Dieline, SpotUV, Foil.
3. Set the objects to overprint, so they do not knock a hole in the artwork.
4. Confirm the layer appears as its own separation, using the checks from the previous lesson.
5. Tell the printer the layer names in your covering note.

Names vary by shop. Ask what they use; CutContour is the convention in large-format and vinyl work, Dieline in packaging.

The spec you send

One paragraph that answers everything a shop needs:

Finished size 90 × 54 mm, 3 mm bleed, printed 4/4, on 350 gsm matt art card, matt lamination both sides, spot UV on the logo (layer SpotUV), round corners 3 mm radius, quantity 1,000.

Every number in it is something you had to decide. Being able to write that paragraph is most of what a print buyer does.

Ask for samples before you specify

Paper names mean different things at different mills, and a stock you liked at one shop may not exist at another. Ask for a swatch book or a set of printed samples early in a relationship; most suppliers give them away because a designer who specifies confidently is a designer who orders.

Then keep them. A drawer of real paper, labelled with weight, name and supplier, is worth more than any online chart, because the two things that decide a stock (how it feels and how ink sits on it) cannot be photographed.