Painted Edges, Gilding, and Patterned Edge Book Printing
At QinPrinting, we offer an array of edging options. We can paint a single colour onto your book’s edges to bring a stunning and high-class effect to your book’s appearance. Gilding—in which we apply coloured metallic foil to the edges of the pages—is a traditional and classy choice. The “gilding” needn’t only be gold. We offer silver, copper, bronze and a rainbow of dazzling foil colours from which you can choose. How about a custom pattern or image sprayed onto the edge of your book pages? With this technique, you can even choose a unique pattern for each side.
Whether block colour painted, gilded in coloured metallic foil, or customized with a pattern of your choice, these exciting techniques can elevate any book into a work of art.
Painted, Gilded, and Patterned Edges Options
Whichever style of edge enhancement you choose, we can offer you a range of options. What you decide to include in your book design will depend on the book’s content, binding style, the rest of the artwork or your company branding, and, of course, your budget. So, let’s look at what’s on offer.
Option 1: Edge painted with custom colours: this is the solid colour or gradient colour option. We can make custom colours using the CMYK or Pantone systems.
Option 2: Custom edge patterns: these could be abstract, illustrative, or represent your branding, logo, or company name.
Option 3: Luxury gilded metallic edges: You’ll have seen gilded edging on old bibles and works of poetry and literature. But it needn’t be gold. You can choose any colour you like from our extensive range.
Unlike most other printing companies that offer these services only for hardcover books, with QinPrinting’s state-of-the-art technology and skilled edging experts, you can apply these effects to either hardcover or paperback books as you need. Size is also no object, we’ll edge your books beautifully whether they’re large or small. We can also change out the edging—say between blue and yellow painted edge versions—in a single run. So, for example, if you were printing 1000 copies of your novel, you could choose to have 500 of them with blue painted edging and 500 with yellow.
If you have a series of books—such as a trilogy, quartet, or quintet, for example—we can spray paint a single image across all the books so that each volume has a section of the image which is completed when they are aligned side by side.
Applications for Painted Edges, Gilded Edges, and Patterned Edges
As we can apply these techniques to either paperback or hardcover bindings, you can use them to excellent effect across a range of genres. These are the most popular book types for which our customers have used special edging effects:
Other clients have used these techniques on non-book products, too, with superb results. These products include Tarot cards, oracle cards, game cards, thank you cards, business cards, postcards, notepads and more.
Special Edges Artwork Tips
The quality of your artwork reproduction is always important, especially when you’re adding special features like painted, gilded, or patterned edges. With that in mind, here are a few useful tips to help you when you’re preparing your files for the printer.
If you choose gilded edges or solid colour painted edges, you don’t need to prepare the artwork files. Just let us know which CMYK or Pantone colors you’d like and we’ll see to the rest.
If you decide to paint the edges with images, illustrations, or a logo, you’ll need to account for the “bleed zone” when preparing your layouts. The bleed must be 3 mm (0.125 inches).
So, when calculating your book edges length, you need 0.125 inch bleed + book width + book length + book width + 0.125 inch, so it will wrap around the entire edge.
The width calculation is 0.125 inch bleed + book thickness + 0.125 inch bleed.
If you choose painted edges for your book, remember that you can’t use bled to the edge rich colours on the interior pages. It would interfere with the painted edge results. In other words, edging can only be applied if the pages have a white margin inside.
If you’re working with a professional designer to create your files, they should understand what’s needed to make everything “print ready”. But if you’re working with design software yourself for the first time, these are the vital tips to remember before you submit your files. Still, our team of experts will always manually check all your files before we go to press. If we find any issues, we’ll let you know and help you resolve them. We won’t print your book or other product until we’re sure we’ll get a perfect result.
QinPrinting Rated Excellent
Susan!!!! These books are SOOOOOOO beautiful! I don't think we could have dreamed how joyful it would be to open the box and find such care for and beautifully printed books. This was a special day -- we hope to have many more like it.
Thank you for fielding so many questions. Your patience with us (well, me) was so kind. You and your team have gone above and beyond for us.
Gratefully,
MAC
Their product quality, attention to detail, and clear communication have exceeded my expectations at every step. I truly appreciate their dedication and care, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with them on many more projects to come.
I'm also impressed with the quality of their prints!
I am absolutely delighted with how the book has turned out. The quality is outstanding, and the books arrived beautifully packed and in perfect condition.
The Qin Printing website, is exceptionally comprehensive and clear. It made understanding the process much easier.
The Qin Printing team live up to your their slogan, “Passion in Every Page.”
Let's Talk!
If you’re keen to elevate your book design by adding one of these special edging effects — and only the finest product and unbeatable customer service will do — we should talk. Get in touch today to chat through your needs or to ask for a no-obligation quote. We can’t wait to help you make your next book into a stunning work of art!