Such a Creep...

... If the title had you wondering, then don't worry - this Blog post is all about a print term called 'creep' or push out or shingling or even feathering.

If you're not sure what creep is then i'll try and explain that first. Imaging you're printing a stitched brochure - a reasonable amount of pages and can be any size. Now this part you can do on your own. Grab a handful of paper (i'd say over 20 sheets so it's exaggerated), now just bend them in half like you're about to fold them... do you see the movement of the middle pages..? They all start to extend past the first piece of paper to the thickness of all the sheets you have.. That's creep.

Now imagine you have artwork on all those sheets that have been set up with the same guides as the first sheet! You'll end up having parts of the artwork chopped off. This doesn't really happen until you're at least 48 pages in on around 100gsm paper. There are various ways to prepare for creep - printers can have automated processes involved in their prepress to crop for the page creep or you can adjust the pages yourself. It's always best for this to be accounted for at the design stage so that everything is within your control. If you're creating a brochure and you're not sure about creep - then always ask for a paper dummy from your printer - this will be an exact reproduction of your final brochure and you'll be able to account for the amount of creep needed per page.