A fellow prepress person and I were talking about the term “creep” today and I thought I would take a moment to post about some of the information I found. It just so happens that Elisabetta Bruno over on Designorati covered the same subject a few days ago.

Printindustry.com states…

Shingling, or creep, refers to the fact that the trim margin of inner pages of inner signatures of saddle-stitched books are actually narrower than pages in outer signatures.

The Prepress Dictionary on Prepressure.com has a great illustration of what creep actually looks like under the term Shingling.

In today’s printing industry we are really lucky to have software out there that helps us compensate for the creep effect that occurs. There is also a special formula that exists and it is when you…

Take the total pages in the book and divide it by four. Take that and times it by the paper thickness. Then take that number and divide it by the total number of “flat sheets” in your book. This final number represents the amount of adjustment you need to make to each of the pages outer margin. This will build as you get closer to the center of the book.

My friend is convinced this formula is a hoax but that’s just because of his bad luck with some of the stocks we use and the less than ideal ancient press machines.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Printing, Graphic Design, Tips & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.