Designing for Letterpress
- The physical nature of letterpress printing means that some things will look different when printed than they do in your design file, and manual production means that you may see slight variations in ink coverage, registration, or trimmed edges.
- One color is printed at a time when letterpress printing. The press uses rollers to apply a thin layer of ink to the plate type/block/forme just before printing each sheet of paper that is fed into the press. When printing more than one color on the same sheet, all of the paper is printed with the first color, then the ink is then cleaned off of the rollers, the next ink color is added to the rollers, and all of the paper is run through the press again to be printed with the second color (this is why adding additional colors increases cost).
- Lines thinner than 0.25 pt will not be guaranteed to print properly. Do not use “hairline” settings. Always check line widths after reducing the size of objects.
- Fonts smaller than 6 pt will not be guaranteed. Always check point size after scaling type.
- Ruled borders, boxes, or other artwork that runs parallel to the edge of the paper will look best when they are a minimum of 0.25” from the edge of the paper.
- Leaving less than 0.125” between your design and the trimmed edge of the paper is highly discouraged unless the artwork extends beyond the edge of the paper (bleed printing).
- When bleed printing, extend the illustration 0.125” beyond the intended border.
- Type often looks slightly thicker when letterpress printed thanks to the shadows created by debossing (physical impression into the paper).
- Conversely, type and line work that is knocked out will look thinner when printed, and will therefore require special preparation.
- In order to maintain the integrity of non-vector imagery such as calligraphy, hand lettering, drawing, and other non-digital images (ie: vintage engravings) for letterpress printing, they should be digitized using a specific method. Do not “vectorize” these types of elements in illustrator.
- Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files are best for producing letterpress plates when the design includes elements that are not hand drawn or hand written such as computer fonts, vector illustrations, etc. All text that is not hand drawn should be created in Illustrator whenever possible.
- Adobe Photoshop is used to process non-vector elements like hand lettering and scanned illustrations, text, or design elements which are then embedded into the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) file. When all of the elements in a design are non-vector, the entire design file can be created in Photoshop and sent as a native Photoshop (.psd) file.
- Adobe InDesign (.indd) files can be used, but can be quirky and unreliable at times, so are not recommended.