Gripper is a printing term that doesn’t seem that important for your print design. But it is important to your printer, so what does it mean?
You have a great vision of your design, you’ve worked it all out in InDesign. You’ve chosen your PMS colors, searched through tons of paper samples, and made a decision. Your client encourages you to keep your costs down. You think you will be able to save them a bundle because you have laid out the design on a small sheet of paper. You march into the printer confident in your work, only to have a pressman give it a slight glance and say, “Sorry, we need more gripper, so we have to print on a bigger sheet.”
Now that is a frustrating thing. So what can be done? Well, there may be something the shop can do. Here at cutpasteandprint we work to make sure your design can get on press as efficiently as possible. Considering gripper as you design could help you avoid any trouble at all.
So what is gripper?
A gripper, is basically a space on a sheet of paper that allows for the press to physically grip the paper. This is where the machine pulls the paper and guides it along the path to print. And so, anything under the guide is obviously outside of the printing area and effectively unprintable.
If you have printed anything out at home, then you have more than likely encountered a gripper issue before. Many home printers claim to be able to do border-less printing, and while many do this function flawlessly, others seem to always leave a small white band of unprinted area. This white band along the edge is usually where the machine has gripped the page. As the guides held the paper in place, they also made it impossible for that area to be printed on.
Gripper varies from machine to machine, and depending on the paper size and the nature of your design. When you are planning some very strict specifications for a client, its always a good idea to check with your printer and make sure that it will run smoothly on press. Especially when you are designing something that runs right to the edges of your selected sheet.
An Example
Below, you can see that while there is a a fair amount of grey-space around the whole flyer design, the top space is slightly longer. This is to account for our gripper. Unless you want the top of the blue line trimmed off of this flyer, you would need to set up the design on the page with a little extra space. Of course where and how the pressman places the gripper is a matter of give and take with the design. When in doubt just ask.
