Understanding Commercial Printing Requirements
Staff

So you're ready to start designing your brochure but you just read on your printer's website that they require the design to be CMYK at 300 DPI with a 1/8" bleed and a 1/4" safety. Yikes! what does all this mean? No fear, it's all pretty simple once somebody explains it to you, and if you follow the printer's requirements you will end up with an accurately sized and colored brochure.

Color Mode

Lets start with the color mode. Most commercial printers use a 4 color printing process. They use combinations of these four colors to make a wide array of all the colors that will be in your final printed brochure. The four letters in CMYK stand for the colors that they use:

C Cyan
M Magenta
Y Yellow
K Black

Most design software will allow you to choose CMYK from a number of different color modes. When you are designing for print this will almost always be the mode you will have to work with. Choosing this mode will ensure that the colors you choose for your project will be able to be printed by a 4 color commercial press.

Resolution

Resolution refers to the number of pixels that fit in one inch of space. DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. The more pixels per inch, the greater amount of detail you will be able to have in your design. Most commercial printing requires a minimum of 300 DPI. This ensures a good amount of clarity and detail for your printed brochure. When creating a new project with your design software please be sure to set the resolution before you do anything else. Changing the resolution after you have already begun designing doesn't yield the desired results.

Bleed

In order to understand "bleed" you need first to understanding how most commercial printing works. Your final document will be printed on a sheet of paper that is larger than it's final trim size. It is then cut down to it's final size by a trimming machine. This allows for colors to extend to the the very edge of the paper. The colors and design can only extend if the design has been bled. This means that you actually design your brochure to be slightly larger than the actual final trim size, making sure not to have any important designs or text extend beyond the safety margin, a concept we will talk about later.

The standard bleed for most commercial printers is 1/8th of an inch. This means that your document should extend 1/8th of an inch from each edge. This adds 1/4 inch to the document size before it is trimmed. Therefore, if you were designing a 8.5"x11" brochure you would want to set up your design to be 8.75 inches x 11.25 inches. After the document is printed and the 1/8th of an inch is trimmed your resulting brochure will be 8.5"x11"

Safety Margins

Because the trimming machines are not always accurate it is recommended that you keep your important images and text from extending beyond a certain area. This will help you to avoid any important brochure copy or images from being lost or cut off when the brochure is trimmed down to it's final size. Most commercial printers recommend a safety margin that is 1/4 inch within the final trim lines of your brochure.

Following these standard commercial printing guidelines will help to ensure a final product that you are happy with. Please be sure to check with your printer for their specific brochure printing guidelines as the protocols vary from printer to printer.