I got sample books from Star Print Brokers, one of the printers I’m looking at for Board Game Day, a while ago. I had always thought that matte finish was less durable than gloss finish, but since I now had one of each book to test out, I decided to do some experiments with the two books to test their durability! The following tests are shown in the video below:
- Dropped some water on the pages of the book and wiped it off
- Same as above, but with saliva
- Left water on the pages of the book for 10 minutes and wiped it off
- Colored the pages with crayon and then tried to wipe it off with a wet paper towel
- Soaked an outside corner of the book in a shallow bowl of water
- Put the books in a bag with some blocks, shook it, and threw them on the ground
- Used school glue to glue pages together
- Put packing tape on a page and ripped it off
Overall, I was surprised that water didn’t seem to affect the pages of the book at all through the finish. The main difference in the two finishes were with the crayons (gloss wiped off cleanly and matte didn’t) and with the packing tape (gloss ripped off almost the whole page and matte ripped cleanly). That was a fun experiment, and it’s nice to know that both are pretty durable!
I don’t know if I’ll end up using this manufacturer, but if I do, I’m thinking of going with matte finish since I like the look of that one better. If I choose a different manufacturer, I’ll need to get some more samples and do some more testing!