Checking Your Booklets for Mistakes

Rushing into booklet printing is not recommended. You must take your time and always check and recheck your work when you print custom booklets.

This prevents any kind of mistake in your booklets from being mass-produced as the booklet printing process goes on. To organize your quality checks, you need a standard quality checklist and procedure to make checking easier.

Below is our version on how to check your booklets for mistakes. You may adopt this and add upon it, as you like.

1. Review the content organization – First remember to review the organization of your content. More often than not people actually just patch together several sections thinking that it can already be considered as a whole. However, you must be aware of the correct transitions and the proper phasing of contents so that people can follow a booklet’s concept logically as they read through it.

For example, important concepts must be explained first at the outset, before you delve into the more advanced details of it. So review your content and its organization. See if it flows right and that readers are eased in to the different concepts it introduces. This should make sure that your color brochures are easily read with no confusions.

2. Proof read all text – While organizing your text, you might also want to proof read them as well. This should be a standard practice in all printed works like booklets, but sadly, sometimes errors do still appear. So make sure that different people proofread the text of your booklet so that different perspectives and mindsets can analyze the text effectively. Hopefully by doing it this way, you should minimize any typographical errors to a point that they are not noticeable.

3. Check images and captions - After the text, do not forget to check your images as well. Look for any errors in the images like pixilation, color distortions and bad picture cropping. Also, see if your images are properly placed with the correct captions. Lots of errors occur in this aspect of booklet printing since people rarely review them with any kind of focus.

4. Determine if the layout settings are correct – Also, before printing begins, make sure that you layout settings are correct. Your margins must be set correctly for all the left pages in your booklet as well as all the right pages. The binding or spine must be taken also into account by reserving a little space for them in the booklet dimensions. Be sure to check this well so that you will not encounter any major errors in printing.

5. Compensate for print options – Finally, make sure that your booklet printing options are the real options that you need. Did you set your design correctly for ring binding for example by placing hole markers in your designs? In addition, did you correct your colors as you convert from RGB to CMYK colors for printing? Try to check these special print options before you finally send your designs to print so that you will not have any mistakes in your booklet printing that may cause a major reprint.

So that is our little checklist for booklet printing. Hopefully this can be enormously useful for you. Just add in any other special checklist item if you want so that you can customize your checks and increase your effectiveness. Good Luck!

Katie Marcus writes about print custom booklets or booklet printing.