Nowadays, printed products are still highly appreciated as information and communi-cation media, despite the rapid development of electronic media. The corresponding production machines, i. e. the printing machines, essentially use cylinders to transfer ink and transport paper as needed in the printing process, so that three-dimensional rolling contact problems have a central importance in printing machines. In the so-called offset printing process, first the ink has be transferred to an intermediary cylinder with a rubber cover, called printing blanket. The ink transfer from the blanket to the paper occurs in a second step. A printing blanket is a multi-layered thin structure. In general it consists of a covering rubber layer, an elastomeric foam layer and several orthotropic tissue layers (cotton). The covering layer is responsible for ink transfer. The elastomeric foam provides the blanket construction with a defined amount of compressibility. Finally, the tissue layers provide elastomeric layers with a higher tenacity and stabilise them against Relaxation. Aim of the present study is to predict the printing behaviour of a blanket on the base of its mechanical properties, using numerical simulation and experiment. A finite element model taking account the different layers and materials of the blanket has first to be developed. For this aim, the different layers, which form the blanket, can be grouped into two categories: printing elements (i. e. covering and foam layer), mainly responsible for the printing function of the blanket, and structural elements (tissue layers), mainly having a stabilising function. Afterwards, each of the blanket materials has to be characterised on the base of elementary tests (tensile and stamp tests). The test results, i. e. a set of material parameters can be used to feed up the finite element model, in order to simulate the three-dimensional ink transfer process. The simulation results (contact pressure and slip in the cylinder contact zones) are verified by experiments, carried out on an offset printing machine. Selected pixels from printed pictures are surveyed and measured microscopically. In this way the slip, which occurred during the printing (rolling) process, can be experimentally determined and compared with the slip predicted by the finite element model. Using the example of the offset blanket, the present work demonstrates how the mechanical and printing behaviour of complex structures can be examined numerically and experimentally. The principle of differentiating printing and structural layers, which is the basis of the numerical simulation carried out in this work, allows the simplification of the complex construction of the blanket, so that time-dependent material behaviour, arising from the elastomeric layers on the one hand, and orthotropic material behaviour, arising from the tissue layers on the other hand, can be examined and identified separately. Hence, the numerical model presented here can be used as a basis for further examinations, investigating the viscous properties of blankets at high printing speed, for example.