How to brief a printer

Print is unforgiving in a way websites are not. A website that ships wrong gets fixed on Tuesday. Two thousand brochures that came back the wrong colour are two thousand brochures, sitting in boxes, already paid for.

Almost every one of those boxes traces back to the brief — not to the press. So this is what a printer actually needs from you, why each item exists, and which decisions stop being reversible.

The five things that decide the price

A printer cannot quote without all five. If you send three, you will get a number that changes later, and it will change upwards.

1. Quantity. Not “a few hundred”. The exact number, because of the cliff described below.
2. Finished size, flat and folded. An A4 folded to DL is a different job from an A5.
3. Page count, if it is more than one sheet. This drives the binding, and the binding has rules.
4. Stock — the paper. Weight and finish.
5. Colours and finishes — full colour or one; lamination, foil, spot UV, die-cut.

Add the deadline and where it is being delivered, and you have a brief that can be quoted accurately in one round instead of four.

Quantity, and the cliff nobody mentions

There are two ways to print, and they price completely differently.

Digital has no setup cost. You pay roughly the same per piece whether you order 50 or 500. It is the right answer for short runs, prototypes, and anything you might need to change soon.

Offset requires making plates — physically, one per colour — before anything prints. That setup is charged whether you run 500 copies or 5,000. Which means the per-piece cost starts high and falls steeply as the run grows.

So there is a crossover point, and it is worth finding rather than guessing. Ask for the quote at your number and at a higher one. It is genuinely common for twice the quantity to cost twenty or thirty percent more rather than twice as much, because you have already paid for the plates. If you are going to reprint within the year anyway, that comparison is the whole decision.

The reverse is also true and less obvious: if there is any chance the content changes — a phone number, a price list, a staff name — the cheap-per-piece large run is the expensive option, because you will bin it.

Colour will not match your screen

Any printer who promises it will is misleading you, and the reason is physical rather than technical: screens emit light, paper reflects it. They are not the same colour space and one cannot fully contain the other.

Practically, this means:

• Convert to CMYK before you approve anything, and look at it in CMYK. The vivid blues, bright oranges and neon greens that look right on a monitor are exactly the ones that dull when converted, and seeing that on screen at least removes the surprise.
• Use a Pantone spot colour where a brand colour must be exact. It is a pre-mixed ink rather than a blend of four, which is why it is consistent and why it costs more. Worth it for a logo, rarely worth it for a photograph.
• Large black areas need a rich black, not 100% K. Black ink alone over a big area looks washed and grey; a rich black adds the other inks underneath. Keep small text at 100% K though, or it will look fuzzy where the plates don’t align perfectly.
• Lamination shifts the result. Matte lamination in particular mutes and slightly lightens everything under it. If the piece is being laminated, the proof should be too.

If your logo has defined print values, this is where they earn their keep — see what to send your logo designer for the list of colour values worth pinning down before any of this comes up.

The file rules, and why each one exists

These are the ones that cause the expensive surprise, and every one of them is cheaper to fix before the file goes to press.

Bleed — usually 3mm. Extend any colour or image that touches the edge 3mm past where the paper will be cut. This exists because trimming happens to a stack, and a stack shifts by a fraction of a millimetre. Without bleed, some copies come back with a thin white sliver along one edge — not all of them, which is worse, because it looks like a defect rather than a decision.

A safe margin — usually 3–5mm inside the trim. Same tolerance, opposite direction. Text sitting right against the edge will look uneven across the run even when nothing went wrong.

300 dpi at final size. The last three words matter. An image that is 300 dpi at 5cm is 75 dpi at 20cm. A picture pulled off a website is almost always 72 dpi and cannot be rescued by changing a number in the export dialog — the detail was never captured.

Fonts outlined or embedded. Otherwise the press substitutes whatever it has, and you find out at delivery.

Fold and die-cut marks on their own layer, clearly labelled. A fold line drawn in the same black as the artwork will print.

Binding has rules, and they constrain the design

Worth knowing before the layout is finished, not after:

• Saddle stitch — folded and stapled through the spine. Cheap and fine for lower page counts, but the page count must be a multiple of four, because one folded sheet is four pages. It also suffers creep: on a thick booklet the inner pages push outward and get trimmed slightly narrower, so anything critical near the outer edge will drift.
• Perfect binding — a glued flat spine, the way most paperbacks and annual reports are made. Needs enough pages to have a spine at all, and the spine width depends on the paper, so the cover artwork cannot be finalised until the stock is chosen.
• Hardcover — case binding, for anything meant to survive being kept.
• Wire-O or spiral — the only sensible choice for anything that has to lie flat while someone works from it. Manuals, cookbooks, training packs.

A design that assumes one and gets sent to another is a redraw, not an adjustment.

The proof is the moment, and there is more than one kind

Nothing should go on press on a verbal yes. But not all proofs check the same thing:

• A PDF proof checks content and layout — spelling, order, position, that nothing is missing. It tells you almost nothing about colour, because you are looking at it on a screen.
• A physical proof checks colour and material — how the ink actually sits on that stock, with that finish.

If colour matters, insist on the second one, on the actual stock. That is the last moment a change costs you a conversation instead of a reprint.

And read the proof as though you didn’t write it. The single most common thing found at this stage is not colour at all — it is a phone number, a date, or a price that was correct three drafts ago.

What to send, in one message

• What it is, finished size flat and folded
• Exact quantity — plus a second quantity if you want it compared
• Page count, if bound
• Stock preference, or ask for a recommendation and a sample
• Colour: full colour or one, and any Pantone that must be exact
• Finishes: lamination, foil, spot UV, die-cut
• Deadline, and what it is attached to
• Delivery address, and whether it needs splitting across sites
• Artwork as print-ready PDF with bleed and crop marks — or say plainly that you need it built

If you do not know the answer to some of these, say so rather than guessing. “Recommend me a stock for a 24-page company profile that has to feel substantial” is a better brief than a weight you picked because it sounded right.

The deadline is the one thing that cannot flex

Print deadlines are almost always attached to something that will not move — an event, an AGM, a launch, a shipment. Everything else in this list can be renegotiated. That cannot.

So commit the date in the quote, and work backwards from it: delivery, production, proof approval, pre-press check, artwork ready. Special finishes like foiling and spot UV add time, and bound books add more. A schedule that only works if every approval happens the same day it is asked for is not a schedule.

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We do this end to end — print media, including a pre-press check on artwork designed elsewhere, which is a normal request and not a nuisance one. If the file needs rebuilding we will say so rather than printing something that will disappoint you, and if you would rather the artwork was built for the press from the start, that is graphic design.