What Is Overprinting?

Just what is overprinting? There are many different terms in the printing industry. A lot of them can be confusing, especially if you’re not familiar with printing. One of these terms is an overprint. What does this mean?

Is it when you print too many copies of a document? No, it isn’t that. But if that’s what you thought it was originally, you’re not alone. It is an overlapping of colours that can create problems for your design. So let’s get into exactly what overprinting is.

What Is Overprinting?

It is when the colours are printed over each other. This can create different colours that you didn’t want. If the overprint is done unevenly, it can ruin your whole project.

You can activate or deactivate overprint in your software settings. Some users want to keep overprint activated because sometimes printing colours over each other can result in a creative and nicely done work of art.

The problem lies in having it activated when you don’t want to use the feature. When you’re designing your project and you don’t know that it has been activated, you’re looking at printing something out that looks completely different from the design that you worked on.

By doing this, you might have to start over from scratch. So make sure to check your settings before designing your projects.

Things To Remember

For graphic designers using overprint, there are a few things to keep in mind in order to create the best design that you can. First thing is that black is often set to overprint. Black printed over other colours will create a darker black.

It’s the opposite for white. White should never be set to overprint seeing as there is no white ink in printing. By setting white to overprint, you won’t see anything in the finished product. You’ll only see the layer beneath.

As for the rest, you can play around with the setting as much as you’d like. It could possibly go wrong if not used properly, but on the other hand, you can create some really interesting designs with overprint as well.

Managing your overprint settings in Adobe isn’t hard. Just go to Windows > Attributes and you’ll find the setting there.

We do hope you liked this blog post? We have more blog posts available for you to read on our website.