OnFulfillment Blog | Commercial Print (3)

If you’ve worked with commercial printers, you know that sometimes they start speaking a whole different language. We feel your pain!

Chances are, you don’t have time to invest in a copy of the Pocket Pal, produced by International Paper and generally regarded as the “industry Bible” of graphic arts terminology. You don’t really need to. A few printing 101 lessons will bring you up to speed in no time.

To help marketers everywhere, we’ve put together a handy list of printing terms that have one nifty thing in common – they’re all acronyms!  Enjoy this alphabet soup of printing terms!

When people talk about printing, they usually focus on the front end of the process – the design, the size, the format, the colors (like 4C and PMS colors), the paper, and the printing itself – digital, offset, and screen, to name just three.

But let’s not forget the “back end” of the process – the stuff that happens to a print job after it comes off the press.

Post-press operations are a combination of binding and finishing.

Remember the scene in the rock music mockumentary, “This Is Spinal Tap,” where the Stonehenge model built for the concert stage as a prop turned out to be 18 inches high instead of the intended 18 feet (thus turning the group into a laughingstock)? It was traced back to a bad spec written on a napkin.