/ˌrɛdʒ.ɪˈstreɪ.ʃən mɑːrks/

Registration marks

noun (plural) · reprographics / transfer

What it is

Registration marks are reference points shared between the layers of a job. Put the same mark — most often a fine cross inside a circle, or a short tick at a corner — in the same spot on every layer, and you can overlay those layers so their content coincides exactly. Line the marks up and everything else lines up too. Break registration and the layers drift, so a two-colour print shows a coloured halo or a stencil's second pass lands off the first.

In a transfer, the marks let the artist reposition a pattern, a stencil, or a lifted section without losing its place on the surface. This is where they matter alongside the analog tracing tools: an image scaled up on an opaque projector, or a design traced on a light box, can be re-registered after the projector is bumped or the sheet is lifted. The same idea underpins AR tracing, where the software keeps the overlay registered to the camera view so the reference tracks the real paper automatically.

Etymology

"Registration" comes through the Latin registrum, a list or record, and in printing took on the sense of things being correctly recorded in position relative to one another — printers speak of a job being "in register" or "out of register." "Marks" names the physical tokens that make that alignment checkable. The convention was standardised by commercial printing, where separate colour plates must each land in the same place; the crosshair-in-a-circle became the near-universal symbol, and the same marks migrated into stencilling, screen printing, and pattern transfer.

Examples in use

A screen printer prints crosses on the first colour so each later screen can be dropped onto the same spot. A muralist marks two corners on the wall and on the projected artwork, so if the projector shifts overnight the outline can be reset next morning. A stencil artist punches register holes to repeat a motif evenly across a border. In the AR tracing app the registration step is automatic — the overlay stays pinned to the camera's view of the paper — but the underlying goal is the same one printers named centuries ago: keep every layer in its place.