Guide to designing a softcover with interior cover printing

We are very excited to now offer printing on the inside of soft cover prints. There are a few considerations you should keep in mind when designing for this piece.

1. Art lost in the binding.

Because of the way the manuscript is glued to the cover, use caution when placing art that extends from the inside of the cover onto the first or last page of your manuscript. Let's take a look at this example of some friends grabbing a bite to eat.

BUT the construction of the book does have a seam, so you will lose a bit of art in that area.

As you can see, the results are not pretty! So, what can be done to prepare for this? 

• The easiest thing is to avoid running art that is intended to be continuous across these two pieces. We know people will want to do it anyway, so let's look at some ways that we can improve the results. 
• You should treat it like any other trim and safety area, keeping your important elements out of this area. Instead of running the seam down the middle of a face, make sure it runs in the space between people where you would only lose a bit of the out of focus background information. 
• You can make some accommodations in your layout to account for the art lost in the binding. You can see from this photo that you lose about 3/16th of an inch on each side, so you can move your art away from the trim or fold by this much in your layout. The results will never be seamless, but it will surely improve them.

2. Changes in substrate and coating will make your colors appear differently.

The cover stock is a thick paper board called "12 pt C2S" -- the point refers to the thickness of the stock, and the C2S means "coated on two sides". The outer side of your cover will have a film lamination added to it. Prior to lamination, both sides of the cover stock would have the same results, but the lamination will effect the way you see the color. The cover stock uses less of something called an "optical brightening agent" (OBA) than the manuscript stocks. This means that if you were to hold the two side by side, the cover stock would appear slightly more yellow than the manuscript stock. This base will effect the inks added to it as well, making the colors look a bit warmer. Let's look at some examples.

If your monitor is well calibrated, you should see a clear difference to each of the colors across the 3 different examples. Let's see this on a photo.

So what can be done to prepare for this?

• Choose your art accordingly. Running a solid color across those 3 different areas is going to be hard to manage. There are too many variables for us to make a helpful suggestion here, but in general you may want to "cool down" your color that you are using on the inside of the front cover. Consider avoiding using the same color, but instead use some complementary colors that don't depend on it being identical across the spread.
• The effects are going to be less drastic in photographs than in flat colors. When you were looking at the earlier examples of art lost in the binding, did you even notice the difference between the interior of the cover and the manuscript page? So you may want to consider using a photograph instead of flat colors.