At Kaligraphic Print, every book we produce is trimmed, as the last stage of the production process. To ensure this is neat and clean, with no strange slivers of white at the edges of pages, we require all files with some kind of background which goes to the edges of the images to have a minimum of 3mm of bleed. Bleed means that when you design the product, the background must extend 3mm outside of the actual product size.

You can set this up very easily with all professional design programs. When opening a new document, in the document set up settings, there will be a section that refers to Bleed, with a box in which you can set the amount you need. For Kaligraphic, we prefer 3-5mm, if you forget at this point, you can always go to File > Document Setup and fix it there. If you’re not using Adobe programs, it may also be in settings for layout, or printing.

When your new file opens you will see a blank page, but around it, 3mm away from the page boundaries, there will be a red or dotted line bordering the page. This is your bleed limit, and your backgrounds and graphics that go outside of the page boundaries must also reach this bleed limit.

When you have finished your design, it is also important that you include this bleed in the export process. In your export settings, there will be options to turn on crop or trim marks, which you need to select, and also it will allow you to set the bleed limit. In Adobe programs it will have a box you can check to ‘Use Document Bleed Settings’, which will automatically set it to your initial bleed set up. If you decide that even though you’ve set it to 5mm, you only need 3, you can uncheck this box and put in 3mm instead.

In Adobe  settings this will be under the Marks and Bleed tab.

For books featuring images and backgrounds going to the edge of the pages within the text of the book, the same requirements and settings apply.

At Kaligraphic Print, we do inexpensive foiling, and a range of celloglazed finishes. Due to how foiling works, this can be a complicated process or a very simple one. To foil elements on a printed design, we must print those elements in black, and then run the sheet through our celloglazing and foiling machine. The foil then sticks to the printed areas cleanly and permanently.

If you’re having foiled shapes and text on a white background– this is a simple two step process:

1. Print the foiled areas in black
2. Apply foil

If you want foiled shapes that overlap a background, or other background elements that aren’t foiled, this becomes a four step process:

1. Print the background elements that are not foiled
2. Celloglaze background (this applies a layer of clear laminate that will prevent the foil from sticking to the ink of the background elements)
3. Print the foiled areas in black
4. Apply foil.

For designs where you have printed areas, and foiled areas, but they don’t touch or overlap on a white background, you can eliminate the need for celloglazing by using this 3 step process:

1. Print foiled areas in black
2. Apply foil
3. Over print the non-foiled areas

Due to this process, the document set up when you wish to include foiling is also different. In order to foil correctly we require your design to come in two separate pages. One page must be the non-foiled elements only. The other page must be the foiled elements only, in black, regardless of which colour foil you have ordered.

Foiling works best on bulkier fonts, simply because the end result can be a little tricky to read, and the bulkier it is, the clearer the words are. We do not recommend it for paragraphs of text, or thin lines that must be perfectly aligned.

In mass production, things can get out of alignment by a millimeter or two quite easily, and if your line is only a millimeter wide and is out of place- this can be very obvious- while we are always watchful for when this occurs, the more margin for error in a complicated 4 step process like foiling is best. For example- if you have foiled lines of 0.5mm to border a black square on a white background, if the machine shifts a page 0.3mm in one direction, suddenly the border of the square is noticeably out of place. When this kind of mistake is made, the two printing, and one celloglazing layers that came before on this page have now gone to waste. And if this happens in 1 out of 5 pages, of a 100 page order, this results in 20 wasted pages of ink and celloglaze. Had the border line been 1mm or 2mm thick- this slight misalignment would have caused no issues. So keep in mind that we require a certain amount of margin for error to avoid waste and delay in completing your order.

If you have any questions about this or any other kind of file set up feel free to email our Graphic Designer, Mel, at graphics@kaligraphic.com.au, and she will assist you!