Printing terms explained, in the order you’ll bump into them

Printing terms explained the quick way: nearly every bit of jargon on a product page belongs to one of five piles. Some words are about your artwork file, some about what the thing is made of, some about how it is finished, some about shape and size, and the rest about timing and delivery. Learn a handful from each pile and an order form stops reading like a car manual. We have kept each one to a line or two, using the real sizes and materials on our pages.

Pile one: words about your artwork file #

• Finished size. What the piece measures after it has been cut. Your document should be set to this, before any bleed is added.
• Bleed. Background that carries on past the cut line, so a tiny drift in the trim never leaves a white sliver. Rigid boards want 3 mm on every side. Our page on bleed and the safe area has diagrams.
• Safe area. The margin that text and logos should stay inside: 10 mm on boards and 50 mm on hemmed banners, where the fold and eyelets live.
• Crop marks. Hairlines drawn outside the page to show the cutter where to trim. They sit beyond the bleed and never end up on the job.
• DPI. How many image pixels land in each inch once printed. Small items like cards want about 300 at full size; banners, seen from further back, are fine at 100 to 150. More in dpi for printing.
• Vector and raster. Vector art is built from shapes (PDF, AI, EPS, SVG) and stays crisp at any size. Photos are raster: a grid of pixels with a limit.
• CMYK and RGB. Print is made from cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. Screens and cameras work in red, green and blue light, and the switch to ink can take the edge off very bright colours. See CMYK vs RGB.
• Pantone. A numbered reference colour, common in brand guides. Send the number and it gets matched from CMYK as closely as the material allows.
• Print-ready PDF. A PDF at finished size, with bleed, in CMYK, with fonts turned into shapes or embedded. The artwork guidelines list the lot.

Pile two: what the thing is made of #

Material words decide how long something lasts and where it can go. Most of the confusion is between three boards that look alike in photos.

• gsm. How many grams one square metre of the stuff weighs. Heavier usually means tougher: a 440gsm PVC banner is a good deal heavier than 260gsm mesh. Our gsm guide compares common weights.
• PVC. The plastic in our standard 440gsm PVC banners, and in Foamex board too.
• PVC-free. Our 400gsm alternative banner, for indoor jobs and venues that ban PVC outright.
• Mesh. 260gsm woven PVC full of tiny holes that let wind pass, which is why it lives on fences and scaffolding. Compare the two in PVC or mesh.
• Correx. Polypropylene sheet with hollow channels (the flutes) running through it, so it weighs next to nothing and doesn’t mind rain. Standard thicknesses are 3.5 or 5 mm, street Correx 5.5 mm. It bends more easily across the flutes than along them. See Correx boards.
• Foamex. Rigid foamed PVC with a smooth face. Thicknesses: 3, 5 or 10 mm. Best on indoor walls and under cover. See Foamex boards.
• Dibond (aluminium composite). Two thin aluminium skins around a plastic core, 3 mm thick. It stays flat, never rusts, and takes a drill or a shaped cut happily. The long-haul outdoor option: Dibond signs.
• Monomeric vinyl. The sticky-backed film we use for stickers, glass graphics and floor graphics. It likes flat, smooth surfaces and sulks on rough ones.
• NCR. Short for no carbon required. Coated sheets that copy your handwriting onto the pages below, as in NCR invoice books. See what is NCR paper.
• Silk and kraft. Silk has a low sheen and is the usual flyer and card finish. Kraft is unbleached brown card, such as our 300gsm kraft business cards.

Pile three: finishing, cutting and fixing #

• Hem. A banner edge folded back and welded, which is where the eyelets go. Worth having on anything outside.
• Eyelet. A ring punched through the banner edge for ties. Plastic or metal; metal copes better with weeks of wind.
• Cable ties. The plastic zip ties that go through eyelets or drilled holes. Add a bag or two to a PVC banner order and you won’t be hunting for them on the day.
• Drilling. Holes put in a board before it ships, top corners or all four, ready for screws or ties.
• Profile cut. A board cut around the outline of the design rather than left as a rectangle. Offered on Foamex, Dibond and Correx.
• Die cut and kiss cut. A die cut goes right through, so each piece comes away on its own. A kiss cut stops at the liner: the sticker shape is cut, the sheet stays whole, and you peel them off one at a time. Custom logo sticker sheets use the kiss cut.
• Lamination. A thin film over the print, in gloss, matt or soft touch, to fend off scuffs and wiping. Gloss makes colours pop but catches glare; matt has none and reads easily under lights; soft touch feels a bit like velvet.
• Strut. The little hinged leg that lets a counter card prop itself up, like a photo frame.

Pile four: shapes, sizes and formats #

• A-sizes. Fold any A-size in half across its long side and you get the next one down. The ones that matter for signs: A3 (297 × 420 mm), A1 (594 × 841 mm) and A0 (841 × 1189 mm). The whole family is in our A-size table.
• DL. A slim third of an A4 sheet, 99 × 210 mm. The standard flyer and compliment slip shape; its envelope is 220 × 110 mm.
• Portrait and landscape. Portrait stands tall, landscape lies wide. Every roller banner is portrait.
• Roller banner and cartridge. The cartridge is the metal base the print winds into; pull the graphic up, clip it to the pole and it stands on its own. Every one of ours is 2000 mm tall, and widths run from 800 to 1500 mm. Budget, Standard Plus or Premium describes the base, not the print. The buying guide compares them, or see roller banners.
• Feather and teardrop flags. A feather flag is tall and narrow with a curved top edge; a teardrop is rounder and keeps its shape in a light breeze. Our feather flags go up to 16 ft 1 in (4900 mm) and teardrops up to 15 ft 1 in (4600 mm).
• DTF. Direct to film. The design is printed onto film, and that film is heat pressed onto a T-shirt, hoodie or tote. See DTF transfers.

Pile five: timing, checks and delivery #

• Turnaround. How many working days until your job leaves us. The clock starts once both the order and the artwork are sorted. Each product page lists its Saver, Standard and Express times, and the turnaround page explains how they work.
• File check. Every uploaded file gets looked over by a real person, free, for size, resolution and bleed.
• Online designer. Our free in-browser tool for building a design from scratch or a template.
• Artwork service. The paid option when you would rather someone else lays it out. Typesetting is a fixed-price option and includes 1 design and 2 rounds of changes.
• Oversize item. Anything over 3 m on any side, or a board bigger than A0. It adds £15 to delivery, and street Correx is exempt.
• Delivery. £7.95 to UK mainland addresses, free on orders of £100 or more after discounts. Other areas are on the delivery page.

Printing terms explained for safety signs #

Two more terms turn up on safety products, and they matter more than most because they carry legal weight.

• ISO 7010. The worldwide rulebook for what safety pictograms look like. Every symbol carries a code: W001 is the plain warning triangle, P001 the plain no-entry style prohibition. Workplace signs in Great Britain sit under the Health and Safety (Safety Signs and Signals) Regulations 1996, and our safety sign colours guide explains the shapes.
• GHS pictogram. The red diamonds you see on bleach and other chemical bottles, set by the GB CLP rules. Our COSHH symbols page decodes them.

Found a word we haven’t covered? #

Having printing terms explained in the abstract only goes so far. Spotted jargon on one of our pages or in one of our emails that isn’t listed? Send it over through get a quote and you’ll get an answer that fits your actual job.

One last tip. When two printers use different words for the same thing, ask for the measurement instead. A size in millimetres or a weight in gsm means the same wherever you buy, and that is the kind of printing terms explained that never lets you down.