8 Printing Things Graphic Designers Need To Know

8 Printing Things Graphic Designers Need to Know

As a graphic designer, the reserve and learning of printing knowledge are indispensable. Some design drafts look beautiful, but the printed objects are far from the renderings; on the contrary, some design drafts look very inconspicuous, but with the printing process and printing materials required by the designer, they can achieve very good printing The difference lies in the designer's understanding of printing knowledge.

Today I will share with you 8 printing tips that graphic designers need to know

The resolution setting in the print design must reach 300 pixels/inch. It should be noted that the size must be set first and then the resolution. Otherwise, it is useless if the size is small and the resolution is increased, so it needs to be confirmed before design. Resolution and size, otherwise the picture will become blurred after the design is completed and then enlarged.

The bleed (margin) is generally set to 3mm when designing the print. The size of the bleeding must be taken into account when designing the print, because the printed product will be cut by 2mm-3mm in the later stage to ensure the perfection of the work.

When designing prints, the color mode needs to be set to CMYK mode, and the CMYK color mode is used for the presentation of print images.

CMYK is also known as printing color mode. It is composed of four colors of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The amount of each ink used ranges from 0% to 100%. Since the three inks of CMY cannot form pure black in printing, a separate ink is required. Black ink K, thus forming the color material mode of CMYK. The larger the amount of ink, the heavier and darker the color; conversely, the smaller the amount of ink, the brighter the color. In CMYK, 0% is white and 100% is black.

Printing fonts: Nowadays, the commonly used fonts for printing Chinese characters include Xingming body, Song body, Kai body, line black body and so on. When designing printed materials, try to use as few fonts with too thin strokes as possible. If the font size is too small, it is often difficult to print, or the font looks unclear.

The main text is generally used: Song Dynasty, Shu Song, imitation Song

First-level titles are usually used: Dahei, Dabiao Song, Xiaobiao Song

Second-level headings are usually used: Song Hei, italics, and bold

Print size: The actual size of the printed text is different from the size we see on the screen. In order to pursue a beautiful layout, some designers with insufficient printing knowledge use too small font size when designing their works, but they find that they are not clear when they are actually printed, thinking that it is the problem of the printing factory. This is the consequence of lack of printing knowledge.

Printed characters vary from large to small, and the font size measurement of Chinese characters in typesetting and image processing software mainly adopts the font size system and point system for printing.

Different prints place more emphasis on the size of the font. For example, in the case of album design, if there are many words, the font size is recommended to be larger than the font size of 3 for the main title, smaller than the font of size 4 for the subtitle, and smaller than the font of size 6 for the text. The line spacing is generally adopted 1.5x line spacing.

It is recommended that the text size for manual printing or picture book printing should not be smaller than the 7th font. If it is too small, it will affect the reading and printing quality.

Letterpress printing: Ink expressiveness is about 90%, rich in color tone. Strong color reproduction. The layout is durable. The number of prints is huge. A wide range of paper is used, and materials other than paper can also be printed. Generally used in a large number of printed materials, such as color magazines and popular building materials printing, etc.

凹版印刷（烟标，酒标，方便面口袋，糖纸等印刷质量要求高的，印刷数量大的印刷品比较常用这种印刷方式）

Offset printing (this process is widely used and the quality process is stable, such as newspapers, books, packaging, PVC, self-adhesive)