Wrap Me In Plastic - Encapsulation

So you've read what lamination is...(if not, read here). Isn't that the same as Encapsulation? Well the simple answer is... not really.

Folding & Creasing

There are so many different ways your print can be folded. 
The most common folds are shown below. 


Paper of around 170gsm and above should be creased before it's folded, this is to prevent it from 'cracking' down the fold. This involves scoring the paper before it is folded. Creasing can be done in a few ways - the most common is on a folding machine that creases just prior to folding this allows for a faster turnaround as it's reducing the amount of offline processes. The alternate way is to run it on a separate machine that presses the same score line into the paper.


Cracking occurs when coated paper is folded - it can sometimes purely be aesthetic but at the same time can also lead to a total failure along the fold. Cracking is made worse by heavy coverage of ink across the fold.

Most Common Folds

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.

Fancy a trim?

Trimming is the process of cutting a document down to its finished size.

Commerical printing presses cannot print to the very edge of a sheet of paper so in order to achieve this effect, your design is usually printed onto a larger piece of paper. The excess unprinted border is trimmed off after printing using a guillotine. 


 If you are creating artwork for print, you will need to add an area of bleed to your design which is the part that's trimmed. If you're not sure what bleed is, take a look at our article 'What is Bleed?' for more information.

A guillotine operator at work

Lamination

Laminate is a very thin sheet of clear plastic which can be applied to one or both sides of a sheet of paper. It provides protection from handling and prevents ink from smudging or coming off on the hands (this does not apply to most digital printing which use a dry ink toner). Lamination is commonly used on the outer covers of premium brochures, corporate folders & premium business cards.


Lamination is also a great way to bring out either texture printing or Spot UV.