Printing and Graphic Design – Crop Marks
Now before everyone chimes in on how to properly create crop marks for printing, allow me to get started on the topic. To begin with, crop marks are great. They tell us where to trim the paper so that the artwork bleeds properly and everything is where it’s supposed to be. But that doesn’t mean the graphic designer should be putting crop marks on everything. In fact, printers would prefer designers leaving them out altogether when submitting files for print. That’s right. But how would they know where to trim the artwork?
Well, when submitting your file, you indicate the “finished size.” If your bleeds are correct, the computer nerds in the printing company will understand that the outside 1/8″ or 1/16″ is bleed space. As your artwork is arranged onto the press sheet, the crop marks AND trim marks are added. Many digital prepress departments within printing companies use highly automated file ripping systems that will get confused with the additional crop marks since they change the document size. More importantly, most of the time, artwork is not printed 1-up (1 artwork per sheet). Rather, depending on a variety of factors, including the size of the press, the prepress department may decide to run 4-up, or even “gang” the artwork with another project for efficiency.
In doing so, crop marks on the 4 corners would be futile since they would print onto the adjacent artwork, which may be your own. Only the prepress technician(s) can gauge the situation and place crop marks AND trim marks appropriately. Don’t worry, your project will print just fine.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Zack_Gaskins |
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admin | 
April 17, 2011 8:10 pm
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