Printing Term Glossary
Printing Terms
Print terminology made easy
To all our new starters who haven’t been in the industry for long. Have you ever been involved with your colleague whilst they’re arranging products for print, and it goes along the lines of “We need to ensure the Pantone on the proof matches the artwork to establish the selected coating doesn’t affect the screen print undercoat” and all you could think was “What?”.
In order to help you understand what all the technical printing lingo is about, we carefully selected 12 of the most common phrases used in the printing industry.
Printing term glossary
Artwork – a design obtained from a designer that is ready for print.
Bleed – a print area that goes over the trim marks (usually 3mm) to ensure the artwork doesn’t get cut short. The bleed marks are represented as the red lines in the proof below:
Coating – a layer that goes over the uncoated print commonly used to protect or enhance the ink. There are four major categories: matt, glossy, cast and dull.
Debossing – a process in which you press artwork into the paper to make it recess.
Embossing – a process in which you press the artwork into the paper to make it raised.
Dye-Sublimation – a process in which a dye changes the colour of the material rather than applying colour on top of it.
Lithography – The process of placing a lithography plate on a product, inking it, and then printing it to achieve high-quality results
Pantone Colour – a collection of colours and codes widely used within the design industry to achieve the same colour repeatedly.
Proofing – a 2D mock-up of the artwork on a product that shows placements and colours pre-production.
CMYK – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black), standard printing colours used world-wide, including your office printer.
RGB – Red, Green, Blue. Monitors and other electrical devices are the only devices that can accurately display digital colours.
Screen Printing – Transferring an image onto (most commonly) fabric through the use of a fine mesh.
So, there you have it, a basic glossary of the commonly used technical printing terms in the industry. There is of course a much bigger list, but I wouldn’t want to overload you with information, so we’ll save those for another day.
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