General guidelines

Page size and trimming margins

The size of the publication has to be exactly the same as the final trimmed size of the product. Bleed should extend 5 mm over the trimming line. Please, set bleed for cover, case, jacket and etc. according to the template you recive from Grafostil.

Avoid text cutting

You will avoid text cutting if you do not position text or other essential elements (e.g. logos) closer than 5 mm from the trimming line. With perfectbound products the effect of the spine has to be taken into account for headline text that crosses the double-page spread. In normal cases a 3 + 3 mm margin between letters is sufficient.

With perfectbound products the effect of side glueing has to be taken into account with the inside covers and on the first and last pages of the contents. Side gluing reduces the usable page area by around 8 mm starting from the spine.

Picture over the spread

With perfect bound products a part of a picture will be hidden due to glueing in product’s back. Grafostil do not pay attention to this in its imposition process. Therefore, if you want the picture shows without ”break”, you should move picture from back to outward on both pages of the spread. Our recommendation for perfect bound products is 3 mm per page (3+3).

Line thickness

Don’t use “hairlines” when specifying the thickness of lines.The true thickness of hairlines varies depending on the software used and the printing resolution. Specify line thickness either in points or in millimetres. The smallest recommended line thickness is 0.25 points. We do not recommend the use of thin lines with half tones or many colours. The minimum thickness of negative lines is 1 point.

White text

Depending on the web width, paper weight, paper quality, etc. the offset process might have dimensional changes in a paper. The dimensional changes of the paper can cause misspass in press. This problem appears especially clearly, when a small size, white text is used on a 4-colour image or an multicolour element. These problems are compensated at Grafostil’s prepress and press stages, but the best result will be reached, if you pay attention to the following recommendations when using white text on multicolour surface:

• Use at least 8 pt type size
• Use font type with even thickness (grotesk, sans serif)
• Use bold or heavy typefaces.