Booklet design - presentation and printing.

When budding graphic designers are studying for their future career, one element which they are hardly ever taught is how to prepare work for print. When we employ a new printing design designer, we always find that while they are always familiar with the software and can layout a simple and striking design, when it comes to converting this to a format the printer can use there are always mistakes.When it comes to prepping work for print, a booklet design is always difficult because the numerous pages increase the chances of mistakes. So these are things to look out for.

Number of sheets per page. Always ask the printer how they want print work presented. Traditionally, printers have always wanted the designer to do the hard work and layout the pages for them either in spreads, or in printers pairs. However, printers with new software most often want each individual page laid out on its own, in order. They simply feed this into their software and it compiles the booklet design document for them. CMYK conversion. Make sure all colours are pictures are converted correctly to CMYK.

Crop Marks and Bleed. When work has no bleed, printers get nervous. Make sure that each page has at least 3mm bleed. On the design side, also make sure that all the text and pictures you want are safely inside the crop marks.

Embedded fonts. This one is a killer, as mistakes are often really hard to spot on printer's proofs. Make sure that your fonts are properly embedded, or converted to vector paths. Otherwise the font you expected to see will be replaced for a slightly different 'standard' font. If this happens to a logo font, then you are in trouble and often the whole booklet design will have to be reprinted.

Colour Choice. Unless you are working in Pantones, colours will always vary in print. Make sure you play it safe and there are adequate differences in your colours so text stands out against the background.

Provide clear instructions. Printing is a very competitive business, and many printers will not take long prepping your material. Make sure any instructions are made really clear and never assume that a printer will do what you expect - it is better to be considered patronising, than to have 100,000 copies of your booklet design printed with a stupid mistake.