How did you celebrate the end of the Nepali year? We had a massive potluck lunch and filled our tummies with delicious food
But what else did we do? Let’s find out!

How did you celebrate the end of the Nepali year? We had a massive potluck lunch and filled our tummies with delicious food
But what else did we do? Let’s find out!
As all designers know, printing is always a headache in Nepal due to lack of standards, old equipment, and others. Who else better to speak about this than Swapnil Acharya, co-founder of Expresiv Studios, one of Nepal’s premier UI / UX services, and himself an experienced designer who has worked with newspapers, film companies, and more.
Here are some of the tips that Swapnil shared with us about designing for print, and specifically how not to piss off your printing press!
Check the dimensions and layout of the medium you want to print in before you start designing.
Except for flex where 72 dpi is fine.
Having the full content of the project can make a difference between good and great work. Make sure to get the full content from the client before starting your work.
Bleed is the space so that printing machines can hold the paper without tampering the print area, and margin is for functional reading.
Paragraph gutters are space around the column. And don’t forget to include paragraph indentation which is the space around the paragraph, and paragraph spacing which are the spaces between paragraphs.
Flex doesn’t need bleed whereas brochures and other small designs do.
For them everything is a mixture of four colors (CMYK). And anything that is to be printed out needs to be in this color format.
In most cases, a color can be achieved through a mixture of 2 colors (C and M or Y and K or M or Y, etc). As a general rule, see if all components add up to less than 300% out of possible 400%.
It may be possible to reproduce a color after 4 stamps from these different plates (although this is not recommended) but if you are working with small fonts, avoid using mixture colors. Just stick to black or white or Cyan or Magenta.
When printing for text, the CMYK colors are layered on top of one another step-by-step to achieve the black text.
That’s pretty straightforward 🙂
Only use processed and finished images or vectors (i.e. edit images in Photoshop and finalize vectors in Illustrator) in your final paging software (e.g. InDesign) by linking them to the paging software.
72 dpi will be enough for web based post designs and for flex as well. Only use dpi above 72 when you want to achieve high quality/wide images.
This is a good practice and avoids errors related to missing fonts.
Sticking to one printing firm helps achieve consistent results so avoid printing at different places as far as possible.
You can also check out Swapnil’s slides on Slideshare.
Thank you Swapnil!