What are crop Marks?
Where is the term most often used?

On this page you will find excerpts from Printers, who specify how they need the camera ready artwork and film itself prepared for printing. At the end are a list of links to websites where you can learn more about the process of sending artwork to have it printed.

Regarding fonts, some printer would like for you to include fonts, others prefer you change your fonts to outlines:

Fonts:
Do Not include Fonts with artwork...Please change you font to outlines. Call for assistance.

What is bleed?
When the pages are printed and it's time to cut the paper to its final size; a hydraulic powered knife comes slamming down to cut the paper. As you can imagine, the knife may be slightly out of skew with the crop marks so we must use a BLEED area. When you hear the term "bleed" you must imagine the color on the page flowing off the edges of your panel. Expand the background color of your artwork off the edge of the panel a minimum of 1/8" (0.125") for REPLICATION or 3mm for DUPLICATION all the way around the perimeter of your artwork. E.g.: if your background color is blue, then stretch the color beyond the boundary of your crop marks. Make sure you don't cover up the crop marks.

What are Crop Marks?
When you do a layout, your main film size will usually be 11" x 17" so the printer needs to know where your artwork boundaries are for each panel. - Crop marks tell the knife where to come down and cut your paper sizes. Since we use DIE CUT presses - it is vital you follow all template sizes exactly!

Text Box: Put your text safely away from the edge. MAKE SURE THERE ARE "BLEEDS!" "Bleeds" mean that the underlying color or pattern goes off the edge for at least 3mm and into youropks.
EXAMPLE:

 

9. CROP MARKS, BLEED AND REGISTRATION MARKS

Crop marks:

Crop marks tell the knife where to come down and cut your paper sizes. Since we use DIE CUT presses - it is vital you follow all template sizes exactly! These marks look like this:

Crop marks

In this example, the short dark vertical line meets the short dark horizontal line to form the top left corner of the panel. These lines will be included on the template, however, if you are creating yours from scratch they should be 0.75 mm thick.

Registration (Colored) Marks:

After our documents have separated into films (CMYK or PMS Spot colors), the printer and the screener need to reassemble the films in perfect alignment.

Almost everybody has seen the Sunday newspaper's cartoons with the colors spilling out of the lines - this is registration gone bad! If the colors all stack neatly on top of each other- you get perfect color registration.

The publishing program can create registration marks or "Bullets" automatically so you must tell the film house to include registration marks.

100% Cyan
100% Magenta
100% Yellow
100% Black
+ any Spot Color used in the drawing.

Bleed:

When the pages are printed and it's time to cut the paper to it's final size, a hydraulic powered knife comes slamming down to cut the paper. The knife itself may be slightly askew, hence, we must compensate by using a BLEED area.

When you hear the term "bleed" you must imagine the color on the page flowing off the edges of your panel. Expand the background color of your artwork off the edge of the panel a minimum of 1/8" (0.125") all the way around the perimeter of your artwork. Eg: if your background color is blue, then stretch the color beyond the boundary of your crop marks, but make sure you don't cover up the crop marks.

This will eliminate any unsightly white lines running along the edge if the knife is indeed out of alignment.

Perforation Marks / Fold Marks (for tray cards or mail back reply cards):

To indicate folds or perforations please use a DOTTED line 0.75mm in width instead of a solid line which is used for crop (cutting or trim) marks. For perforations (tray card spines or reply cards) the printer will use a special cutting wheel (similar to a pizza wheel) to perforate the paper. It is vital that the "spine" on a tray card is 6mm wide.

Don't carry crop or perforation / fold marks through the artwork or they will show up in the final print!

Crop Marks

Crop marks tell the printer where they should cut.  If they aren't there, the printer has to guess, which is bad.  It's conventional to indicate a crop with a solid line, and a fold or perforation with a dotted line.

Crop marks should be thin (.25 point is standard - don't use "hairline" for technical reasons) and should not extend all the way in.  The ends of the crop marks should be offset by 1/16-1/8".  In most templates (ours included) crop marks are assigned registration color, rather than black - just in case, for design reasons, black doesn't get printed.

Crop marks at the edge of the traycard

For further info on preparing documents for print, see:

http://www.omnidisc.com.sg/tutorial.html#cropreg
http://marvin.mrtoads.com/reg_and_crop.html
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/clark_lon/cropmarks/
http://www.designer-info.com/master.htm?http://www.designer-info.com/Writing/spot_colour.htm
http://www.sketchpad.net/cropmarks1.htm          
http://www.prosmarketing.com/artwork.html