The Print Illusion – What is creep and how do I account for it?

Let’s be clear we are not talking about that strange person on the train you have caught staring at you a couple of times.

No, we are talking about the phenomenon of pages in a booklet getting shorter and shorter at the foredge as the booklet gets thicker, leaving a V-shaped front edge rather than a neatly trimmed square edge.

Of course, you can simply trim the front edge square but if the creep has not been allowed for your centre pages may have text trimming off or at the very least the margins will appear to shrink towards the centre of the booklet and grow towards the covers.

So how do we ‘cure’ this? It’s done using imposition software. The printed pages are ‘imposed’ or laid out on the printed sheet in such a way that the body of text is shifted to allow for the issue.

So, in reality on the printed sheet the pages are not centred on the leaves but purposefully adjusted so they will appear as centred on the finished job.

This means we can have lovely trimmed booklets with flat square foredge and equal margins throughout.

We ask that artwork/PDF files for booklets and books are supplied as single pages with 3mm bleed so we have the margins needed to perform this task.

As long as you bear this in mind when supplying files, we can allow our magic software do its thing.

This also applied to case bound and perfect bound books because before binding they are created as mini booklets which are subsequently bound together.

😊