What does "bleed" mean?
On a print job, it is color that goes right to the edge of the page is called a "bleed."

Why does it cost more to do a bleed?
A printing press cannot print ink on the page right up to the edges of the paper. So, when the graphic artist designs a piece that has a bleed, it is designed for a larger piece of paper than the actual cut size. By doing this, the artist designs the piece in a way that color goes beyond the crop marks of the cut size. Therefore, it needs to be printed on a piece of paper larger than the cut size. The extra cost is for the larger paper size and for the added ink coverage.

What does "gripper space" mean?
The printing press has a mechanism to grab the blank piece of paper and pull it through the press to print on it. The gripper space is the white space at the top or bottom of a designed page where the press grabs the paper. This space should be at least 3/8" or more.

What are PMS colors?
PMS is short for Pantone Matching System. This is universally known in the printing industry. Just about every color you could imagine in this system has a number. It is an easy way for the customer or designer to pick out a color for a spot color print job.

What is a spot color print job?
A spot color print job can be a one or two PMS colors (which can include black) that don’t overlap each other.

What does CMYK mean?
On a printing press, there are four primary colors used in a 4-color print job: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and true Black, which is what is called CMYK.

What is a 4-color job?
With a 4-color job, the designer creates the piece with four overlapping colors. The four primary colors are CMYK. Each CMYK color is at a certain percentage of ink coverage. That percentage of ink color, when overlapped with another ink color, creates any and all colors of the color spectrum.

What is Acrobat?
Acrobat is a program created by Adobe that is like a universal language for all computers (MAC or PC) to load and read computer files. When a computer file is converted to Acrobat, anyone can load the file on their computer and view the PDF file providing they have the Acrobat or Acrobat Reader programs on their computer.

What is a PDF file?
A PDF file is the short name given to a file that has been converted to an Acrobat file and stands for Portable Document Format. When a file is converted to Acrobat, it assigns an extension to the file. An Acrobat extension is PDF.

What does dpi mean?
It means Dots Per Inch. Computer graphics and typefaces are made up of little dots. When there are more dots per inch, the graphic or typeface prints more clearly without ragged edges.

What does high resolution mean?
When there are a high number of dpi (dots per inch), it’s called high resolution which is usually 300 dpi or more. A graphic that is 72 dpi is considered a low resolution and is not good for printing. A 72 dpi graphic is usually a JPG file and is best seen on a computer screen (such as for a website) rather than on a printed page.