Lexicon Post #3 – October 20, 2016

  1. Signature – “A signature is a group of pages that are printed on both sides of a sheet of paper. The paper is then folded, cut and trimmed down to the finished page size. The number of pages on a signature depends on your page size and the size of the press sheet they fit on”.  Designer Insight provided the definition listed above and their website provides many diagrams.  We witnessed a signature being printed on our tour.  Once printed it can then go into machine that will cut each page accordingly.  http://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/understanding-and-working-with-print
  2. Hickey Picker – prepressure.com defines a hickey as “a small spot or imperfection that appears in print on images or flat tints. It is sometimes called a bulls eye or fish eye. The problem is most visible in areas of heavy ink coverage”.  They also mention that a hickey is usually cause from a piece of dust, paper fiber or hardened ink that gets on the printing plate.  Off-set printers can use a hickey picker roller which helps reduce this issue. https://www.prepressure.com/printing-dictionary/h/hickey
  3. DPI – Dots-per-inch. I found a definition on QSL Printing’s website: “Measure of resolution of input devices such as scanners, display devices such as monitors, and output devices such as laser printers, imagesetters and monitors. Abbreviated DPI. Also called dot pitch or spots-per-inch (SPI)”.  I believe we talked about this a little bit on the tour, and it was in reference to the printing plates.  There was a different plate for each color and each plate had a different DPI, which the end result would be a broad color spectrum.  We were able to look through a magnifier and see the different dots.
  4. Bleed – “Bleed is a printing term that is used to describe a document which has images or elements that touch the edge of the page, extending beyond the trim edge and leaving no white margin.  When a document has bleed, it must be printed on a larger sheet of paper and then trimed down”.  The website I found this definition on, which I will post below, provided a diagram that clearly showed the bleed margin.  https://rubiks.ca/EN/resource-center/useful-printing-tips.html