Basic Imposition
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, business cards don’t shoot out of the press one by one. Multiple cards are laid out on each sheet, then cut apart. If you’ve created business cards on a desktop printer, you have some idea of what’s involved. It’s fun trying to get the edges of those little rascals to line up with the perforations on your desktop printer’s output, isn’t it? That alone should give you some sympathy for the challenges faced by a commercial print service provider. They’re not printing on perforated stock, but it gives you an idea of the difficulty of trimming printed sheets exactly.
Imposing a simple business card with a plain, white background (Figure 3.13) is fairly straightforward: Line them up and cut them apart.
Figure 3.13. Simple, ten-up imposition for homemade business cards. Looks easy enough (dashed lines indicate trim).
However, if there is artwork that needs to bleed off the edge of the card or fall close to the trim edge, the imposition and trimming process must ensure that, if there are small errors in the process, important artwork is not inadvertently trimmed off (Figure 3.14).
Figure 3.14. Oops. The heartbreak of poor trim (left). A proper, well-trimmed business card (right).
To avoid messy edges on pieces with artwork that bleeds or is positioned close to the edge, the prepress operator has to be a bit creative with the multicard layout, arranging the art so that similar sides of the cards print adjacent to each other (Figure 3.15). Keep this trick in mind the next time you’re printing homemade cards—it may save you some aggravation and some paper.
Figure 3.15. Bleeding artwork presents additional challenges during imposition and trimming. Here are two possible solutions to trimming cards with bleed (dashed lines indicate trim).
On the left, a double-trim layout (easy to lay out, but requires an additional cut).
On the right, a more economical layout to accommodate a single cut.
