An undesirable movement of an offset press blanket or blanket packing material during printing, caused either by blanket stretching, improper tension, or an excessive number of different sheets of packing material. Creep caused by the latter condition is known as packing creep. See Blanket and Packing.
The term creep can also be used to refer to the steady deformation of a plastic (such as a substrate used in flexography) under stress, a condition also known as cold-flow.
In binding and finishing, the term creep refers to the gradual extension of the inner signatures of a book block beyond the edges of the signatures that surround them, resulting in inner signatures having a progressively smaller trim size. Shingling is one means of compensating for creep. Creep is also known as binder's creep, pushout, and thrust, and is commonly an issue only in publications that are bound by saddle-stitching.