What is bleed?

Bleed is an extra area around your artwork which helps to make sure there are no inconsistent edges as trimming isn’t always exact.

If you want your artwork to go to the edge of the print (background colour or image), you will need to extend your design to fill the bleed area. Note the bleed size can differ between products but a minimum of 3mm is the standard.

Bleed area

The background colour is extended beyond the edge of your artwork.

Safe area

Please keep all important graphics inside this 5mm area

When sending over the file to be printed you’ll know that it has the right bleed if the crop marks go into the printed area. Otherwise, you will have a situation where the crop marks still appear on the outside of the background colour or image.

Helpful tip

You can add bleed to your document in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign when saving as a PDF, be sure to enable document bleed settings in the dialogue box.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Adobe Photoshop you will need to make your page size 6mm bigger at the start. For example, A4 is 210x 297mm so your page with bleed will be 216 x 303mm.

Congratulations! You’ve set up your artwork with bleed and crops so then when it comes to print you’ll get a beautiful looking product with no surprises.

We have a number of blank templates you can use, set up specifically for our various products. Get in touch and we’d be more than happy to send you these for free.