Gang up design elements on photopolymer plate or go with crop marks?

Hi there! I’m planning to take a class and have been reading/searching these forums extensively, but I have a question about photopolymer plates. It’s really a judgment call (ease vs. budget) which is why I’m hoping you guys may be able to guide me in the right direction. I’m printing 3 pieces of different sizes (A7, A2, and 4-bar). It’s mostly text and a fairly simple design, so to add a little extra element I’m also planning to do a blind deboss of wide stripes on the bottom inch of each piece.

It’s obviously more economical to gang up the design elements on one plate and not gang up each fully-laid out piece with crop marks. The plate would then be cut apart into the different elements and reassembled on the Boxcar base for each run. I’m leaning toward this method because it’s cheaper (there’s a lot of white space on the A2 piece, especially). But is it a nightmare? I know people do this, especially with a large illustrated design element that will go on several pieces. (To be clear the text would all be its own element, so realistically there would only be 2-3 elements to arrange on the plate, not 10 or more.)

But since I’m a beginner is this a terrible idea? I just hate the idea of paying for all that white space on the plates. But if it’s going to cost me hours and hours of headache, then I’ll do it!

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Yes, go ahead and gang. I do it all the time to save plate material.

The one time I would not gang is if there is close-register color at both ends of the piece you are printing. It is certainly preferable to keep the color plates in one piece for this type of work.

For single color images or not close register work, gang away.

Thanks so much! I was thinking of including a small set of crop marks just on their own on the plate to cut apart and use on the base, so that I can still print crops for the paper cutter. We’ll see. I imagine it’ll be hard to get them lined up perfectly.

It’s a single-color image. Although then I am doing a blind deboss which has a bleed, but hopefully that shouldn’t be too hard. I’m planning to just get one plate made of the stripes in the widest paper width+bleed and then use it for all of the pieces. For the ones where paper size is smaller than the striped plate, I was planning to just attach paper on the overlap space on the tympan like I’ve read about here. (Or do I need to put paper down at all, since it’s blind and there’s no ink to get all over everything?) Hmm.

Anyhow, thanks!