Most print shops describe paper the way most knife makers used to describe steel — a mood word (“luxurious,” “premium”) standing in for a spec that’s actually easy to state plainly. We put the gsm and finish on every job because those two facts predict more about how a piece will actually feel and perform than an adjective ever will: 220gsm Cotton Rag and 118gsm Mohawk text weight are both real, legitimate papers, but they behave completely differently under a deep impression, and a client choosing between them should be choosing on that basis, not on which one sounds fancier in a proposal.
It also keeps our own quoting honest. If a job’s price looks high relative to a similar one, the paper weight and finish are the first thing we check before adjusting anything else — and more often than we’d like to admit, that’s exactly where the difference actually is.
