We encourage you to read all our file prep tips for platemaking. A good design for letterpress will have crisp clean line art and fonts. If you are printing for 100# (or 110#) paper, you can gang up a lot of images together leaving ½” between them to cut with scissors. When you are ready to print, you can cut and paste and arrange your layout on the L Letterpress. When you print on this weight of paper, the edges of the plates will not leave marks on the paper.

However, when you are printing on the thicker weight 200# (or 220#) paper, you will need to set up your files a little differently. With this thicker paper, cut and pasting doesn’t work because the edges of the plates will also impress into the paper. Not the look you want. So you must design your whole plate completely so that everything is in its exact placement and the plate must be a fraction larger than your finished size of your paper. So if your paper is 5” x 7”, your finished plate must be 5 ⅛” x 7 ⅛”. The easiest way to do this is put registration marks at those dimensions so we can send a plate at the correct size.  Cut off these marks when your plate arrives to a size so that the plate edges will be just outside your paper edge.

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Posted in: L Letterpress, L Letterpress Supplies Category