What is bleed and why we need it?
If you've ever sent artwork to a printer, you've probably been asked to "add bleed," and maybe to keep clear of the "safe zone" while you're at it. They sound like jargon, but both are simple ideas with a good reason behind them. Get them right and your printed piece has clean, edge-to-edge colour that sits properly on the page. Get them wrong and you risk a thin white strip down one edge, or important text trimmed a little too fine.
Here's what bleed and the safe zone are, and why we ask for them. We look over your artwork before it goes on press and will flag anything that needs adjusting, but it always helps to understand these two before you start.
What bleed means
Printing is a mechanical process, and every commercial press needs an unprinted area to grip the sheet without damaging it. So how do we print right to the edge of a flyer or a business card? No wizardry involved, just a simple trick: we print on oversized sheets and cut them down to the finished size. The trade uses standard oversized stock such as SRA2 and SRA3 and trims down to A2, A3 and so on. That extra area carries information like bleed that never appears on the final piece but is essential to a clean result.
So when you supply artwork, the file should be slightly larger than the finished size. The extra is the bleed: an additional 3mm of your design extended all the way around, past where the piece will be cut. Alongside it sit crop marks, which show the guillotine operator exactly where to trim.
Why do I need bleed?
Bleed gives us a margin of error, because no press or operator is perfect. There is always a little movement through the process: paper stretches and shrinks with humidity and temperature, it skews slightly as the press lays down ink, and static builds as sheets feed from the stack. Add more steps, like folding or binding, and there is more chance of movement still. The industry-standard tolerance is around one millimetre either way.
If the colour or image in your design stops exactly at the finished edge, even that tiny shift can leave a thin strip of unprinted white down one side after cutting. Extend your design 3mm past the trim and there is always colour for the guillotine to cut into, so the edge comes out clean whatever small movement occurs.
The safe zone
Bleed protects the outside of your design. The safe zone protects the inside. It is the same idea working the other way: keep anything important, such as text, logos and prices, at least 4mm inside the trim line, so a slight shift in the cut never brings it uncomfortably close to the edge or clips it. It also stops a design looking lopsided if the trim moves a fraction.
Four millimetres is the minimum. Booklets benefit from a little more, and large banners can need a good deal more again, so if you're working on something bigger, ask us and we'll tell you what to allow. (You may see the safe zone called the "quiet border" elsewhere. It's the same thing.)
The three lines to remember
It comes down to three edges around your design: the bleed (3mm outside the trim, which gets cut off), the trim (the finished size, where it's actually cut), and the safe zone (4mm inside the trim, where your important content lives). Set your file up with all three and your print will come out clean and professional.
Setting it up
If you're designing for print, a vector application like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or CorelDraw makes this straightforward: set your document to the finished size, add 3mm of bleed in the document setup, keep key content 4mm in, and export a print-ready PDF with crop marks and bleed included. Whatever you use, it's always wise to print a hard copy before sending it to us, to check the layout.
If you have any doubts about bleed, trimming or layout, talk to us before you start. Email your requirements and file to info@saxonprint.com we can give advice and adjust files for a small fee, which can save the cost and delay of a job not coming out as you hoped.
For more on getting a file print-ready, see our file checklist and our guide to RGB and CMYK colour. And if you're ordering canvas rather than a trimmed print, the same idea appears as the wrap allowance, which we cover in our canvas guide.
We're a small studio in Winchcombe, near Cheltenham, and we'd always rather flag a missing 3mm before we print than see your flyers come back with a white line down the edge.