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This page is not directed at the experts. These remarks are for the office worker recently empowered by allegedly easy-to-use computer hardware and software to become a publisher. Learn to respect your equipment, including its limitations. The real empowerment will only come gradually with experience and/or training.
Printing business cards and postcards directly from the computer screen onto a laser printer has become a seemingly good and cheap alternative to having them produced on the printing press at the local quick print shop. However, keep in mind that laser toner does not like abuse. It is only fused by heat onto the surface of the paper. It can easily chip off from human handling or machine processing. In addition, people who are used to full-weight business cards and postcards may have an immediate feeling of cheapness when they handle your light-weight cards.
You probably already realize that your laser printer and inkjet printer cannot print all the way to the edge of the paper. This is also the case for the small sheet-fed printing press at the local print shop. The press needs some way of gripping the paper and guiding or tracking it through the press as it receives the ink. Hence you need to leave clear space for gripper edge and for the tracking wheels along the side. Besides, if your page is too dense with text and artwork, the reader will be put off.
If you want the special effect of text or artwork going to or over the edge of the paper (that is, a bleed), the print shop will have to run your job on larger paper, then cut the paper to create the effect of a bleed.
Photographs are continuous tone images and cannot be directly reproduced on the printing press. Copy machines are getting better at dealing with photos with built in filters breaking the continuous tone into separate dots to allow decent reproduction. If you scan the photo into your computer and print it out on your laser printer, it is still not usable by the local print shop. For best results, pay to have a shop with a camera make a half-tone image of the photo. The press can handle that. The alternative is to develop some skill at retouching what you scan and have the result printed out by an imagesetter, an expensive machine that not all print shops can even afford. It produces a quality image fit to run on the press.
Designing a business card, postcard or flier on the computer screen can be deceptively easy. Very little effort is involved in using multiple colors on the project and they can overlap or touch on the screen. Reproducing touching or overlapping colors runs into the problems associated with hairline register. The color contact can be missed and ugly white space show where the colors were supposed to exactly touch or overlap. A business associate recently paid $250.00 for 500 business cards in two colors. One color appeared to overlap the other. Unfortunately, only some of the cards produced by a local small print shop actually hit. Many cards showed poor registration and a white gap existed between the two colors, although they were supposed to overlap. What kind of business image is that?!