Before my days in the print shop, I was a young designer. I made gig posters - LOTS of them. Once in a while, I’d create smaller-format stuff - tickets, business cards, merch packaging, etc. When I sent that stuff to the printer, I always thought that tiling things or fitting as much on the page as I could would not only save the printer some time, but that I was such a trailblazer in the field they might even look at the way I set things up on the page and think I’d done it in a way they’d never even considered. I was going to revolutionize the industry!
Spoiler alert: I was not.
The truth is - we're working on different systems. Different paper sizes, different ways of cutting down to size, depending on the specific artwork, different everything.
Size. Tiling 4 quarter-sized (4.25"x5.5") flyers on a standard 8.5"x11" sheet is not the way. Sure, it fits exactly, but that's not how it works in the printshop. Sometimes it might - but not always. When cuts are butted right up to each other like they, we refer to that as a "butt-cut." The only way butt cuts can work is if there is a lot of margin on the outside of the artwork. If there is a lot of white space, there is some wiggle room. But, if there is an image 'bleeding' off the page, or text that is super close to the edge, there is too much of a chance of something printing crooked - if it's just off a little bit, they're toast. Or, if it's 2-sided - that can make butt cuts really tough to get right.
Borders. You might think a nice tight border would make things a lot easier. Well, you'd be wrong again. A butt-cut-border is almost impossible to get right. The big issue lies in the printer itself - if the printer prints the image in even the smallest amount of 'off', it shifts some of the image off the paper, and leaves a blank space on the other side. If that sheet gets cut exactly down the middle, well, every one of your prints is off.
Cutting. My cutter has a 30" blade - it's shiny, sharp, and most importantly - straight. It cuts the entire length of whatever is in its way. It can't cut around corners. If you try to lay out artwork that is different sizes, it's not possible to cut around stuff the way you might think I could.
Trim marks. Marks are great, especially when printing 2-sided. They give you some anchors - I'll print a tester out first, and hold it up to the light. Then I'll make some position adjustments so that the trim marks on the front and the back line up just right.
Registration. If you print exactly the size of the page, and there is no room for marks, you don't know if everything is square. You need some sort of marks to know where that 0, 0 coordinate is. If one of your sides is registered, the others will fall into place. If I was cutting those quarter sheet flyers, I'd lay them out on a 12"x18" sheet. I could fit 8 of them on a sheet AND have room for trim marks - and bleed, if the job called for it. Printing oversized and then 4-side trimming is crucial to getting this right on every one.
I guess I should say - I'm giving you all of this information not so you can properly impose your images on a larger sheet for me!! Let me do it! My printer uses a program that sets up bleed, marks, tiling, spacing, and all other specs of imposition. I can set it to work with the exact paper size that I'm printing on, and use my experience to set up your files in a way that makes the most sense for me, my gear, and the jobs on the table.