“The point of my mag is to have a glossy cover to reveal a more grounded inside.” Liv wrote that to us days before her hand-in, and nobody has described Off Piste better. Her final year university magazine shows snow sports as the opposite of luxury and elite, and the paper makes half the argument: a gloss cover under gloss laminate opens onto pages of natural, slightly rough uncoated stock.
Liv asked the questions every student printing for the first time should ask, so this page leans on her emails. Our commentary sits round her words.
Off Piste helped Liv earn a First Class Honours degree
Here is the ending first, because it deserves top billing. Off Piste and its promotion earned Liv a First, and that mark made up a big part of the First Class Honours she received for her degree. Mike was well chuffed. The rest of this page shows how she got there, starting with a sample pack and a string of sharp questions.
“Apologies if I’m not asking the right questions”
That line closed her first email in April, after explaining she was a university student hoping to produce her final project as a publication. She wanted our sample pack, and we posted it that afternoon. The sheets inside are printed, so she could see how ink behaves on silk, gloss and uncoated before choosing anything.
Her questions were sharp from the start. Could she mix papers inside? Could the cover be debossed? How long would production take with a mid-May deadline? On debossing we were straight with her: premium extras such as foil, Spot UV and embossing add another dimension, and they jump up the cost on small runs. She left the cover unadorned and let the stocks carry the idea.
Her custom format drew a cheer in our first quote: “Well done for breaking convention and going for something eye-catching”. She settled on 280 x 210mm portrait, as wide as A4 but a little shorter, which gives the magazine a chunkier stance than a standard title. If you’re weighing up proportions, our notes on common magazine sizes and when to break them are a good starting point.
“I felt this was a bit heavy but mostly too glossy”
Before ordering, Liv wanted to see her own pages on paper. A friend printing with us had tested a single spread. Could Liv test more? Mike’s answer: “The whole book if you like”. We printed the pages she had so far as unbound flat sheets on 170gsm silk, with one honest caveat: test sheets check layout and feel, and they aren’t colour matched to the final run.
Holding real pages changed her mind about silk. She considered a lighter silk, worried that the thinnest uncoated would be “paper thin like”, and floated a weight in between after talking to a friend. Our suggestion was 150gsm uncoated, which gave a 10mm spine and, in Mike’s words, was probably a good compromise. Her reply: “Thanks for the response, it’s put my mind at rest.”
Torn between two stocks yourself? A flat sheet print of your actual pages settles it faster than any swatch, and it costs far less than a bound copy.
“No, please be as picky”
When the artwork landed, Mike’s first line was “This is a great magazine, enjoyed reading it.” His second was a nitpick. The large solid black backgrounds were built from a heavy ink mix, and best practice is a rich black of C30 M30 Y30 K100, which prints dense without flooding the sheet. Liv told us to be as picky as we liked, tried the change with her tutor, preferred the black she already had and kept it. Her magazine, her decision; we were simply glad to have flagged it.
The cover finish shifted too. Liv had first ticked matt lamination from the prompts on our website. When Mike suggested gloss laminate to match the gloss board, she looked into it and switched, because she was after “that glossy Dazed/ Carhartt WIP style magazine cover with the uncoated more natural texture inside.” Mike agreed that the subject called for that immediate impact.
Earlier, after a phone call with our team, she had double checked her gutter margins by email. We confirmed the plan and explained why it works: you lose 2 to 3mm on the spine side of each page, so keep text 6 to 8mm or more from that edge and let images run right out. She also rebuilt images that weren’t at 300dpi (200dpi plus will do, 300 is ideal), and we warned that bright colours, royal blues and fluoros tend to look muted once RGB files convert to CMYK. For more on stock weights for this format, read our guide to picking text and cover papers for a magazine.
“Without Snow Sports, my uni experience would have been vastly different”
That pull quote sits over grainy monochrome on one of the magazine’s pages, and the uncoated tooth suits it. The cover is a cropped close-up of wet skin and a mirrored blue goggle lens under OFF PISTE in bold white capitals. Liv had worried the photo focused on the goggles rather than the model’s features. On gloss laminate that lens becomes a reflective surface, and the goggles are the point.
Inside, the pacing swings hard. A full bleed spread of orange motion blur burns like a flare. Flash portraits in retro ski suits share a black page with a pull quote. OVERCOMES RESTRICTION stacks over a skier dressed in black on a beach, and COMMUNITY runs right across the gutter, switching between pale on black and black over a misty crowd. The 10mm spine carries DARE TO GO in white on black.
“Honestly so chuffed with it”
The magazines reached Liv two days before her hand-in. Mike’s note the next morning: “The front cover works an absolute treat on the gloss”. Her reply came within minutes.
“I’m so happy I chose yourselves to print with. The service and outcomes has been amazing … you’ve gone above and beyond!”
Liv, on receiving her copies
Her review on REVIEWS.io added: “Mike was there to answer all and any question, no matter how obvious they may have sounded.” A few weeks later, friends and contributors wanted copies, so she corrected a few small grammar slips and we printed a second batch. Then came the marking, and the First we celebrated at the top of this page. Liv was, in her words, honestly so chuffed with it.
If your course ends in a group show, the perfect bound build Liv chose, raw uncoated pages behind a glossy laminated cover, suits a catalogue just as well; our degree show catalogue printing page has the details.
Students with a hand-in date can follow Liv’s route exactly. The FMP magazines and books we print for students start the same way, with a free pack of printed stocks in the post.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100