What is creep, and why does my booklet need wider inside margins?

Creep is what happens when sheets are folded inside each other to make a stapled booklet. The sheets in the middle have to wrap around all the others, so they stick out slightly further at the open edge. When the booklet is trimmed, those middle pages lose a little more than the outer ones.

On a thin booklet the difference is tiny. On a thicker one it can be a few millimetres.

How to stop it affecting your design

• Keep a generous outside margin. Page numbers and text near the outer edge are the first things creep affects. Our standard safe zone is 5mm; for thicker stapled booklets, allow more.
• Keep a generous inside margin (the gutter) too. Text close to the staples is hard to read and can disappear into the fold.
• Avoid thin borders around the page edge. Creep makes them look uneven from page to page.
• Let backgrounds run into the bleed as normal.

Does Printlogik adjust for creep?

Only if you ask. We don’t adjust for creep as standard, so allow generous margins as described above. If your booklet is thick, ask us when you order.

Perfect bound and wiro booklets don’t creep in the same way, because their pages are not folded inside each other.