Most printed things are judged in the first second someone holds them, before a word has been read. That judgement is mostly about paper. After ten years of specifying it here, and a few expensive mistakes, these are the notes I give every new designer in the Lisbon studio during their first week.

weight is not thickness

Grammage tells you how much a sheet weighs per square metre. It does not tell you how thick it will feel. Two stocks at 120 gsm can differ in thickness by a third, because one has been pressed smooth and dense while the other has been left bulky and full of air. When a client asks for something that ‘feels substantial’, the answer is often a bulkier stock at a lower weight, which also costs less to post. We ask the mill for the caliper in microns and compare that instead.

Grain matters just as much, and it is the one people forget. Paper fibres line up in one direction during manufacture, so a sheet folds cleanly along the grain and cracks across it. For the terra alta wines launch book we specified the grain parallel to the spine, which meant ordering a different sheet size and losing four pages per sheet to trim. The book opens flat and has never cracked. The first dummy, made the other way, split on its second opening.

white is a colour

There is no such thing as plain white paper. Every white has a shade, from the cold blue-white of office stock to the warm, almost yellow white of a good book paper. A cold white makes photographs look sharp and a little clinical. A warm white is kinder to long text and flatters skin. We keep a swatch book of nine whites on the proofing table, and we choose one before we choose a typeface.

Choose the white before you choose the typeface. It changes every other decision on the page.

Coating comes last, and it is the decision clients most often want to reverse. A coated sheet holds ink on its surface, so colours stay bright and photographs stay crisp. An uncoated sheet lets the ink sink in, which softens everything and makes black look faintly warm. For the terra alta labels we proofed on both, and the winemaker chose the uncoated stock in about four seconds, because the coated one ‘looked like a supermarket’. He was right.

ask for a dummy

Every mill and every good printer will make a blank dummy: the real paper, folded and bound at the real size, with nothing printed on it. It costs little or nothing, and it answers most questions before they become problems. How does it feel in the hand? Does it close properly? How heavy is it in an envelope? We have changed a stock after holding a dummy more often than after seeing any proof.

Finally, visit a mill if you can. Last spring three of us spent a day at a small mill in the north of Portugal that still makes paper on a machine built in 1953. We learned more about coated and uncoated stock in six hours on the factory floor than in a decade of reading swatch books, and we came home with a sample we are still saving for the right project.