Algeria AgencyBranding & design
Print design: three millimetres decide the result
A print file is not an image. Bleed, safety margin and the proof explain nearly every run that comes back wrong.
The article on the branding pillar sets the rule: the printer will change your file, and will not tell you. This page describes what gets changed, why, and what has to be handed over so that it does not have to be.
The difference from a screen is one of kind. A website is corrected after publication; a run of a thousand is not. It is the pillar’s irreversible part, and it is decided on technical details no mock-up shows.
Three of them explain nearly every failed run we have seen: missing bleed, an ignored safety margin, and a proof signed without being read. None of them is a matter of taste.
This article also covers what is particular here: the Arabic face a printer silently substitutes, and the fact that printed material dies the day a phone number changes — which is a design decision before it is an accident.
The printer will change your file
A workshop receives unusable files every day and has one way of meeting its deadlines: repairing them itself, fast, without calling. It is a service rendered and it is also the main cause of surprises.
What gets repaired without being mentioned: a low-resolution image that gets enlarged, a missing font replaced by an approximation, a screen colour mode converted, a document with no bleed stretched by a few millimetres.
Each of those repairs is reasonable on its own and each alters what you approved. The fourth is the most visible: a stretched document cuts off the bottom of a line of text or moves a logo off centre, and nobody notices before delivery.
The consequence is not that printers should be distrusted, it is that they should be given no occasion to intervene. A complete file cannot be repaired, so it does not get altered.
And talk to them beforehand rather than afterwards: ask for their technical sheet — bleed, margins, colour profile, resolution, expected file format — and design to it. That two-minute question avoids half of what follows.
What fits on a sheet
Before any aesthetic choice there is a material constraint: what you print is cut out of a sheet, and the sheet has dimensions fixed by an international standard.
The sizes in the usual series derive from one another by folding in half, which is precisely why they waste nothing: two copies of one size fill exactly the size above.
A custom size is therefore not paid for in design time, it is paid for in wasted paper. A card slightly wider than standard can reduce the number of pieces per sheet and raise the price by a third for a gain nobody will notice.
That does not mean never leaving the standards. It means asking the price of both before choosing, and the answer often surprises — in both directions, because some workshops have preferred sizes tied to their machines.
One practical note on the long format, a third of a page: it is the commonest leaflet size here because it fits a standard envelope and a pocket. Those are two criteria of use, and they beat a choice of appearance.
| Sheet | Size |
|---|---|
| A4 sheet | 210 by 297 mm |
| A5 sheet | 148 by 210 mm |
| A6 sheet | 105 by 148 mm |
| Long sheet | 99 by 210 mm |
International standard ISO 216 on paper sizes, 2007 revision
Bleed and safety margin
Here are the title’s three millimetres. A machine does not cut to the micron: it cuts with a tolerance, and the stack of sheets shifts slightly under the blade. The whole layout follows from that fact.
Bleed is the material you add beyond the final edge — three millimetres each side, generally. If your background colour stops exactly at the edge, a cut one millimetre out leaves a white sliver on one side and not the other.
The safety margin is the reverse: an interior zone, also three to five millimetres, in which no text or important element goes. A phone number set one millimetre from the edge will be cut off on part of the run.
Both rules can be checked without software: the background has to overshoot, the text has to pull back. It is the most profitable check in this whole article and it takes ten seconds per document.
One trap variant concerns folded and bound documents. On a leaflet the panels are not all the same width — the one that folds inside is shorter — and a mock-up made in three equal columns produces a fold that lands in the middle of a word.
Colour is not chosen, it is manufactured
A colour on a screen is emitted light; a printed colour is inks layered on a material that absorbs. They are not two versions of the same thing, and no automatic conversion reconciles them.
The commonest consequence is blue and orange. Saturated screen blues go dull in print, and bright oranges shift. That is not a printer’s failing: it is what inks can produce.
The working rule is therefore to define brand colours in both systems, and to approve the printed version on paper rather than on a screen. The article on visual identity explains why those values belong in the reference document.
For important flat areas of colour — a sign, packaging, a vehicle — the next question is special inks: a colour mixed in advance rather than built from four. It costs more per run and it is the only way to get exactly the same shade from one surface to another.
Finally, a text black is not a background black. The first has to be a single ink, or a registration shift produces blurred text with coloured edges; the second can be enriched to look deep. That distinction is invisible on screen and very visible on paper.
The paper changes the ink
The same ink, the same machine and the same file give different results depending on the paper, and the gap is wider than most clients imagine.
A coated paper holds the ink on the surface: colours stay bright, details stay sharp, and the finish is glossy or satin. An uncoated one absorbs it: colours mute, fine lines thicken slightly, and black looks grey.
Neither is better. Coated suits an image and a saturated colour; uncoated reads better, can be written on, and gives a sense of material that coated does not. An order pad on glossy coated stock is a mistake of use.
Weight decides stiffness rather than quality. A business card that is too floppy signals economising more reliably than bad graphics does; a leaflet that is too rigid does not fold properly and cracks at the fold.
The only reliable method is the sample. Ask to see and handle three papers before deciding, and ask for a printed copy of your own document if the run is significant. A screen will never convey either the material or the weight.
The proof: what you are signing
The proof is the document that transfers responsibility. Once signed, what comes off the machine is conforming by definition, and an error that was on it is yours.
So it has to be read as a contract rather than a formality. What must be checked comes to a short list: phone numbers digit by digit, the address, the spelling of the company name, prices, dates, and the direction of the Arabic text.
Checking the digits is done by two people, one reading aloud. It is a workshop method that looks excessive and that has, on runs we followed, prevented two wrong phone numbers at five thousand copies.
An on-screen proof does not show everything: not the real colour, not the paper, not the trim. For an important run, ask for a printed proof, and accept that it costs and delays a day. It is the only insurance available.
And check something nobody checks: that the file accompanying the proof is the one that will be printed. Sending a corrected version after signature, with no new proof, is the commonest way a corrected error comes back into the run.
Arabic in print, and the substituted face
A trilingual document in print meets a problem that does not exist on screen: the Arabic face you chose is not necessarily installed at the printer, and the software will replace it without warning.
The replacement does not only produce a different look. Arabic characters join to one another, and a substitution often breaks the joins, shifts the diacritics or changes word lengths — and therefore the whole layout.
The protection is technical and absolute: hand over a file in which the text has been converted to shapes. No font is then needed, no substitution is possible, and what you see is what comes out.
That protection has a cost worth knowing: converted text can no longer be edited. So always keep two files — the editable version for you, the converted one for the workshop — and the visual identity article says why the sources have to stay with you.
One last layout point particular to trilingual work: do not set an Arabic block to the length of the French one. Arabic text is often shorter for the same content, and a layout that stretches it to fill produces false line spacing and painful reading.
The run: setup costs, copies do not
The price of a print job is almost entirely in its preparation: the file, the plates or the setup, colour registration, the first sheets thrown away. Once the machine is set, each additional copy costs almost nothing.
It is the same arithmetic described for the photography session in the content-creation article, applied to a different workshop: the cost is in the setup, not in the repetition. The consequence is identical and it always surprises.
Concretely, going from two hundred to a thousand copies rarely raises the price by more than half. And reprinting two hundred three months later costs nearly as much as the original thousand, because everything has to be set up again.
The decision that follows is not "print more". It is: print the right quantity for the document’s life. A price list that will change in two months gets a run of two hundred even if a thousand costs barely more.
And one practice that genuinely saves: grouping. Having cards, order pads and labels printed in the same pass at the same workshop reduces setups and gives a colour consistency separate runs never give.
What expires: the number, the address, the price
Here is the most expensive section in this article and there is nothing technical about it: printed material dies the day a piece of information changes, and the piece that changes most often is a phone number.
The case repeats: five thousand leaflets, a change of operator or premises, and the stock becomes unusable. Nobody had considered that the document carried two pieces of information of different natures — what you sell, which does not change, and how to reach you, which does.
The design decision is to separate the two. The main document carries what lasts: the activity, the ranges, the images, the name. The contact details go on an area that can be reprinted on its own — a stamp, a label, a strip, an insert.
That solution looks makeshift and it is used by very serious companies, for the same reason. A catalogue with no prices, accompanied by a price sheet reprinted each quarter, has a life of three years instead of three months.
The corollary is a rule of quantity: the more perishable a piece of information, the shorter the run. And a check before any run: can any of the printed information change within six months? If so, it comes out of the document.
The scannable code, and the dead page
The printed square code has become a reflex and it is useful in a narrower set of cases than people think. It deserves a section because it combines the two previous problems: it expires, and it is printed.
It is useful when it saves typing: a long link, a location, an order number, a product record. It is useless when it points at your home page, which the visitor would have found by typing your name.
The commonest fault is the dead page. A code printed two years ago that leads to a page deleted in a redesign is worse than no code: it produces a visible error, on a document you paid for, in front of a customer who made the effort.
The protection is the one described in the content-marketing article: a stable address. Point the code at an address you control and will not delete, even if that address then redirects.
Two technical details decide whether it works: minimum size — below two centimetres across, many devices fail at close range — and contrast, which has to be strong. A code printed in a pale colour on a coloured background is decoration.
The files: what you have to leave with
At the end of a print job three different files exist and you have to leave with all three. Receiving only the last is the situation we find most businesses in.
The source file, editable, with its fonts and linked images. It is the one that lets a line be corrected next year without redoing everything, and it is the one suppliers keep hold of most willingly.
The print file, converted, with bleed and trim marks. It is the one the workshop actually used, and it is worth asking the printer rather than the designer for it: they are sometimes two different files, and the second is the one that produced what you are holding.
And the viewing file, light, with no bleed, for sending by message and showing. It is the only one of the three everybody receives and the only one useless for reprinting.
Require all three in writing before the work starts. It is the same rule as for accounts, photographs and texts, repeated throughout this site: what you paid for has to stay with you, and a print file kept by a workshop ties you to that workshop.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: sending a file to print without a signed proof, and signing a proof without the phone numbers having been read back by two voices. Those are two minutes that protect an entire run.
We will refuse to design a printed document containing information that could change within six months without isolating it on a reprintable area. We would rather deliver a less elegant document that survives three years.
We will refuse to hand over only a viewing file. You leave with all three files from section 10, including the converted version, and including where that makes another workshop able to reprint without us.
What we do: the technical sheet requested from the printer before drawing; bleed and safety margin set from the first document; colours approved on paper rather than on screen; Arabic text converted to shapes; and quantities calculated on the document’s life rather than on unit price.
And what you can do today without us: take the last document you had printed and measure the distance from the edge to the nearest text. If it is under three millimetres, your next run is already at risk — and the correction is free.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the printed result not match the screen?
Because a screen colour is light and a printed one is inks layered on absorbent paper. Saturated blues go dull and oranges shift. Approve colours on paper, and ask for a printed proof on an important run.
What is bleed?
Material added beyond the final edge, around three millimetres, to absorb the cutting tolerance. Without it, a cut one millimetre out leaves a white sliver. Its counterpart is the safety margin: no text within three to five millimetres of the edge.
Should text be converted to shapes?
Yes for the file handed to the workshop, and it is essential for Arabic: a missing face will be substituted, which breaks the joins and shifts the whole layout. Keep an editable version alongside, since converted text can no longer be corrected.
How many copies should we print?
As many as the document’s life justifies, not as many as the unit price invites. The cost is in the setup: a thousand rarely costs more than half again over two hundred, but a price list changing in two months gets a short run.
Should we include a scannable code?
Only if it saves typing something long. Point it at a stable address you will not delete, and respect two centimetres across with strong contrast — below that, many devices fail.
Which files should we get back?
Three: the editable source with fonts and images, the converted print file with bleed, and the light viewing version. Most businesses have only the third, which is the one useless for reprinting.
Where we come in
Measuring edge to text takes ten seconds and grades your last print run. It says nothing about what your printer expects to receive in a file.
- We get the spec sheet from the works you have chosen, and hold to it.
- We move whatever changes within six months onto a slip that reprints on its own.
- We have numbers and addresses read back by two people before anything is sent.
A document with information that will change inside six months does not go to a long run: cut the quantity, which costs less than having been right too early.
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