Wire Binding

Three different jobs that all end in a wire spine

Wire binding at Silver Image London covers three distinct pieces of work, and knowing which one you are asking for changes what we need from you.

Which of the three you need tends to follow the trade. Chambers and firms around Holborn send print and bind, because the bundle has to be right before it is punched. Teams in the towers by Liverpool Street more often send sheets already printed in-house and want only the finishing. Agencies in Mayfair ask for the third: a wire bound brochure with a printed cover, going to a client rather than to a meeting room.

Insurance and broking offices at Bank and Monument send policy, renewal and slip documents to be bound in exact counts. Counsel sets from Fleet Street arrive overnight, wire bound so they open flat on a desk at a morning conference.

The inside margin, and why it is the thing that goes wrong

The rule for any wire bound document is to leave at least 15 mm of clear inside margin on the bound edge. That is the figure to design to. The reason behind it is that the punch bites roughly 12 mm into that edge, so a document built with a 10 mm margin comes back with the text punched through the holes, and 15 mm leaves a working margin beyond them.

This matters more on supplied sheets than on documents Silver Image London prints, because by the time the sheets arrive the margin is already fixed. On a print-and-bind job a narrow margin is caught at file check and can be fixed before anything goes on press. On sheets printed elsewhere the only remedies are to trim the document narrower, which throws off the finished size, or to reprint. Check the margin before the sheets travel, not after.

Page order is the other thing worth settling early. Supply single pages in reading order rather than reader's spreads: Silver Image London imposes the document, and a pre-imposed spread has to be taken apart before that can happen. Double sided halves the sheet count, which makes the document thinner, cheaper and further from the 300-sheet ceiling; single sided is worth it where pages get annotated on the reverse or pulled out individually.

Supplied sheets: collated is the whole difference

Where you are supplying the printed sheets, bring them collated — already in reading order, one complete set after another. This is not a formality. It is the difference between a job Silver Image London can turn around tonight and one it cannot.

Uncollated sheets can be collated here, but it is chargeable and it extends the turnaround, and on same-day work the time is the part that hurts. A thousand sheets already in page order is minutes of work before binding starts; the same thousand stacked page by page is an hour of sorting first. If you are having something printed elsewhere specifically to be bound here, ask that printer to deliver it collated and the whole job gets faster.

Covers, dividers and the 300-sheet ceiling

The standard build is a clear acetate front and a card back. The acetate is structural as much as decorative: it takes the handling that would otherwise scuff page one, and it lets the cover design show through without a separate printed cover. Because the front is transparent, whatever is on page one is the cover, so design page one as one. Printed card covers front and back are the alternative where the document is going to a client rather than sitting on a desk.

Tab dividers bind in with the pages and project past the trimmed edge, which is what makes them worth it on anything navigated rather than read straight through — tender responses, training manuals, board packs. Tabs are positioned during punching rather than added afterwards, so tell us where they fall when you send the file or the sheets.

The ceiling is 300 sheets, which is 600 pages printed double sided. Past that the document splits into volumes. Choose where that break falls yourself, at a section boundary, rather than letting it land wherever the sheet count runs out. Wire diameter also steps up with the sheet count rather than scaling smoothly, so if you are binding a series that has to match on a shelf, tell us the range of extents before the first one is bound.

Artwork specifications

Margins, page order, covers, resolution, file format

Artwork requirements where Silver Image London is printing as well as binding.

Requirement	What we need	Why
Inside margin	At least 15 mm clear on the bound edge	The punch bites roughly 12 mm. This is the rule to design to and the most common reason a document is re-exported.
Page order	Single pages in reading order, not spreads	We impose the document. A pre-imposed spread has to be taken apart first.
Cover	Design page one as a cover if using acetate	The acetate is transparent, so page one is what people see.
Bleed	3 mm on anything running to the edge	Text documents usually need none. It matters on printed covers and full-bleed charts.
Colour mode	CMYK, not RGB	RGB blues and greens sit outside CMYK gamut and print duller than they look on screen.
Resolution	300 dpi at the finished size	Measured on the printed page, not in the file.
File format	PDF preferred — but send what you have	We accept virtually any format and check every file before production.

Before you upload or send sheets

• Leave at least 15 mm of clear inside margin on the bound edge
• Export as PDF, single pages in reading order
• Say whether it runs single or double sided
• Say where any tab dividers fall
• Check the sheet count against the 300-sheet maximum
• If you are sending printed sheets, send them collated

Send the file even where there is doubt about it. Silver Image London checks the inside margin, page order and sheet count before punching, and where a fix is small it is usually just done.

On supplied sheets the check happens on arrival rather than on screen, which is later than anyone wants. A photograph of the first page with a ruler against the bound edge, sent before the sheets travel, settles it in a minute.

Q&A

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