Paper Weight & Thickness: What Every Designer Should Know Before Sending to Print One of the most common pitfalls in print production is misunderstanding paper weight and thickness. Picking the wrong stock can ruin an otherwise flawless design — your business card feels flimsy, your brochure loses its premium hand-feel, or your book bleeds text through the page. Let's demystify how paper weight works so you never make that mistake again. There are two dominant systems for measuring paper. The GSM (grams per square meter) system, used globally, measures the weight of one square meter of paper. A standard copy paper is 80–100 GSM, while premium business cards sit around 350–400 GSM. The other system is points (pt) and pounds (lb) , common in North America. Points measure physical thickness directly — 1 pt = 0.001 inch. A 14 pt card stock is noticeably thicker than a 10 pt. The key confusion? Two papers with the same GSM can have different thickness if one is coated and the o...