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The 30-second quote form — or the instant calculator for 1–20 copies. Your price lands the same day.
Rough or ready. A real person checks your file and offers clear advice on making it ready to print. Free and fast.
Your preview to sign off before we print the run. Until approval you can still make changes to the artwork.
Stapled booklets with you in 3 days, perfect bound books in 5 and hardbacks in 7 days. Free UK tracked delivery.
If you want to see a masterpiece, you go to the Tate. If you want to see a great goal, you go to Wembley. If you want to print a high quality Final Major Project Printing, you go to Ex Why Zed.
Here we are then…it’s the big one! By now you’ll know which end of the camera takes the photos, that Adobe Illustrator is a wonderful world of vectors and that Comic Sans really doesn’t cut the mustard for typographic excellence! (You don’t cut mustard do you, you spread it).
With your final mark on the line, let’s make sure of two things: your book looks the best it possibly can, and that it arrives before your deadline. At Ex Why Zed we are FMP, Dissertation and Thesis Printing specialists. Your work will be printed using the highest quality digital presses to ensure the print quality does maximum justice to your excellent work. We just need you, to give us enough time to produce it!
Don't forget, we also print Degree Show Catalogues too. Here is a selection of our favourites from the past 19 years.
Enjoy looking through our showcase of recent Final Major Project printing
Enjoy our must-read, hugely informative 55 page FMP Printing guide packed with inspiration, ideas and prices to move forward your project.
We have left no stone unturned to provide you with detailed insight about every aspect of the project. Gain an understanding about binding types, page sizes, paper choices.
Enjoy our pro tips, hacks and helpful notes as you progress along the print journey with Ex Why Zed.
Stapled, perfect bound (glued, like a paperback) or hardback? Your page count has already decided — the whole rule in one picture.
Read the full Binding Styles guide →Silk, gloss or uncoated — what each looks and feels like, and the insider hack that saves you money.
Read the full Paper Choices guide →Bleed, page sizes, cover files and the 3 common mistakes — plus we check (or rebuild) your file for FREE.
Read the full Artwork Hub guide →Browse hundreds of real projects we've actually printed — proper inspiration, not a single AI mockup.
Real people who've been printing books since 2006 — friendly, genuinely knowledgeable, and usually replying within minutes.
Design in whatever program you love, save it as a PDF, send it over. Never done it before? A real person checks it for free.
No minimum means you can print a single copy, check the paper and layout in your own hands, then run the full batch with total confidence.
Silk, gloss, uncoated, kraft — we'll post you the real thing so you're never guessing colour and feel off a screen.
Degree hand-in, launch day, a fair this weekend? Tell us your date up front — we'll say straight away if it's doable, then build the whole job around it.
Our standard FMP print specs are heavily discounted to help with student's finances (or lack of 🙂
Offers we do provide are...
We don't charge extra for bespoke sizes on upto 20 copies. Choose any custom size upto A4 for no extra charge.
FREE page quantity upgrades. On stapled booklets, on 1-3 copies, you can choose 8 to 40 pages for the same price. So if you have 12 pages and need an extra 8 pages for more content, then it won't cost you more. On perfect bound books (1-3 copies) you can choose any pagination from 40 pages to 96 for the same price. 52 pages is the same price as 92.
Wire stitching is a little bit of print jargon for ‘stapling’. If you have an A5 booklet then we print it onto A4 sheets, fold them in and put staples along the left-hand edge to bind the sheet together. In some quarters, this is also known as ‘saddle stitching’. Let’s stick with stapling though if that’s easier 🙂
Needs to be a multiple of four pages to work as a stapled booklet. Why? Because when you fold a printed sheet in half, you get four pages of content - try it there and you’ll see what we mean 🙂
Here is a video guide with loads of ideas on styling a wire stitched booklet.
The perfect bound method of binding will give your publication a square spine and professional looking finish.
For further advice follow our perfect binding set up guides.
Easy! Jump on our Ready to Order page for an easy to follow workflow.
Send us the finished artwork using www.wetransfer.com and use the comments area to let us know the number of copies you would like to print and where we should deliver your finished FMP to. We’ll give your artwork a preflight check to make sure it’s set up correctly. If we spot anything then you’ll be the first to know and can make the necessary changes – best to allow an extra day or two for this in addition to the days we need for printing.
Once we have checked your artwork we will send over an invoice for you to pay by online bank transfer or credit card through Stripe.
This isn’t something we really do. We know there are flash points during the year where deadlines become super important - University hand ins are one of them. So, at this time we print the orders in the sequence they come in. This is the only fair way to do it. We recommend if there is an important deadline looking that you allow more time to avoid the printing being rushed.
This is the definitive video guide:
We will need 3mm bleed on all the edges, you'll notice at the moment that the artwork stops at the crop marks - it needs to extend 3mm beyond this to avoid any chance of a white border.
The following page includes illustrated and video guides on how to set up bleed correctly:
Illustrated guide for setting bleed up for print
You might have set this up correctly in InDesign but when you export to PDF just make sure that in the 'Marks and Bleeds' menu you not only tick 'Crop Marks' but you also add '3mm' in to the four bleed boxes - top, bottom, inside and outside. This will add the bleed to the exported PDF.
Here is the easy bleed fix!
It's one of two things:
➡️ Have you dragged the background image out 3mm beyond the black line on your Indesign file into the bleed area? Try that then export again.
➡️ OR you have done the above but then when you're exporting you need to click the Marks and Bleeds menu, then type '3mm' into the four bleed boxes. This will add the bleed to the pdf.
They are — for the specs people ask about most. Every product page shows real prices from real jobs, and our instant calculator prices 1–20 copies on the spot. Everything else is bespoke: size, page count, paper and quantity all move the price, so we quote it properly rather than guess — usually the same working day. Send us your spec and we'll come straight back.
Matt Lamination works best with silk and uncoated covers. We would suggest using gloss lamination if you are aiming for a super shiny, high impact cover. Soft-touch has a velvet, illustrious feel but does attract finger marks REALLY quickly so best not eat your lunch before reading!
The short answer: when paper is printed, the ink sits on the surface. When it is then folded to make your cover the ink can crack. While you should never judge a book by it’s cover, this cracking will look unprofessional. Lamination is a thin layer of protection which prevents the ink cracking. Win win. It comes in matt, gloss, soft-touch or anti-scuff.
We can, go ahead and choose a colour from the GF Smith Colorplan range.
For cost-effective sizes keep your catalogue within A4 portrait, A5 landscape or 210x210mm square - these are the cheapest sizes to print but do choose the size that best fits your publication. The largest portrait size we can print is an impressive A3 (420mm high x 297mm wide). Our maximum square size is 297x297mm. The maximum landscape size is 210mm high x 297mm wide.
Jump on our Instant Pricing Tool and get an immediate cost for 1 - 20 copies of your Final Major Project printing. Toggle the page numbers, paper types and sizes to see the price amend.
Made a last minute change to your book? Don't worry you can easily see the impact it will have on the printing cost.
