Whenever you are designing a document, you should always keep in mind where it is going after it leaves your computer. This usually involves many steps; anything from negative film output, to positive plates, and eventually through the press. While you are considering all of these steps it is easy to confuse things. However dealing with all of these issues ahead of time can make the trip from design to output a great deal quicker and less painful. Here are a few simple tips.

If the document you are creating is a facing page document, then the pages need to be ordered in a specific way. A facing page document is like a magazine. Each page has a partner page at the other end of the document. For example in a 16 page newsletter, the front cover is partnered to the back cover, and the first inside page is partnered to the last inside page. In this same example then, page 4 of the document would be partnered with page 13. Each page is part of a pair. To take this a step further, all facing page documents are going to be double sided, which now makes the single pair belong to a pair of pairs. So page 1 (front cover) and page 16 (back cover) are paired with inside page 1 and inside page 15. As a result, it is also necessary to layout a facing page document in multiples of four. However, if your document does not flow easily onto a four page setup, it is possible to insert blank pages in specific locations. If this concept is confusing, or you are not sure how to design your facing page document, it is easy to get out a pencil and paper and draw a diagram of how the pages are going to be laid out. For further questions concerning facing page layout, please contact us [provide link].

Bleeds are another concept that the customer should be aware of. A bleed is an item that is printed flush against the edge of the paper. An easy example of this would be a horizontal line that stretches all the way across a business card. Or maybe a vertical color box on the left edge of a newsletter, dropped behind the table of contents. Whatever the reason may be, it is important to realize that a document with bleeds will eventually run through a printing press on larger paper and get cut down to size. So, in the example of the business card, it would be designed with the lines running past the edges, so that when we cut them the lines will run all the way to the sides. This is important because as the paper runs through the printing press and as it is getting cut down to size, it can sometimes get shifted as much as an eighth of an inch, making it important to have some room for tolerance on the sides that have bleeds. We generally recommend a quarter inch bleed on the sides that have them. Meaning, extend the item one quarter inch past the edge of the document. For any questions concerning bleeds, please contact us.

It would be difficult to provide a source of extensive design tips on this small site, however there are a few things which have helped me in my development as a designer. When I first started I could look at two different business cards and decide that one looked better than the other, however I could not verbalize as to why. It was not until I decided to be more analytical that I was able to realize the subtle differences in documents and was able to be more precise in my discerning. In general, everything in a document has to have a reason. When you center something, you have to have a reason for centering it. If you want to use all caps, or small caps, you should be able to provide the reason why. But the single question I ask myself when I am finished with a document is, is it cohesive? All the different items in the document have to interact with each other to form a cohesive structure. If the structure you want to get across is formal, then make sure everything follows a similar alignment. If you want it to be chaotic, then intentionally place the text in random places. But be sure to make the random placement intentional.

For more information concerning design tips, there are a handful of good books out there for beginners that can easily be found at most bookstore. Here is just a small list of books that I would recommend.

The Non-Designer's Design Book
Robin Williams, Peachpit Press, Inc.

Great Type and Lettering Designs
David Brier, North Light Books

Low Budget High-Quality Design
Steven Heller and Anne Fink, Watson Guptil Publications.