If you are new to printed media and print marketing, you may not know what print bleed is or why it is essential to ensure your vision comes to life. Forgetting to add print bleed is, in fact, one of the most common errors people make when designing printed media. This helpful guide will explain everything you need to know about print bleed and help you ensure you get a professional finish to all your printing.
What is Print Bleed?
Most printing presses are unable to print right to the edge of a piece of paper. More often than not, your design will be printed on a piece of paper much larger than is required. Your design will then be cut out from this piece of paper, often alongside several other designs.
Cutting the piece of paper to the exact size of your design is time-consuming and impractical. Often white lines are left around the design’s borders, which can end up looking unprofessional. To avoid this unsightly mistake, designers will often extend the edge of their design by a further few millimetres. Within the print and design world, this is known as adding bleed. Adding print bleed ensures those unsightly white lines won’t be a problem if your design isn’t cut exactly to size.
When to Add Print Bleed?
You will only need to add bleed to your design if it extends right to the very edge of your page. If your design is all in the centre of the page with a white background, then extra white lines won’t be an issue, so you don’t need to worry about adding any bleed.
How Much Bleed Should You Add?
The standard amount of bleed to add is 3mm on each edge. Making the total design 6mm bigger horizontally and vertically. However, if in doubt, it is much better to go larger on the bleed area rather than smaller. Your printer can always make the bleed area smaller if necessary. The best people to ask for the right amount of bleed are your printers. They will have lots of experience and will therefore know how they achieve their best results.
What is the Safe Zone?
The safe zone is generally 3mm inside your cut line. This is important because sometimes when it comes to cutting it can be slightly off to the inside. This means that the very edge of your design can be cut off.
It is therefore really important that within a 3mm area of your design, you need to ensure that none of the important information is within this area. For instance, make sure that no text is this close to the edge of the design and that if you are using imagery, it won’t matter if these 3mm are cut off.
How To Add Bleed
Most design software allows you to automatically add in bleed and crop marks when you export the pdf artwork. Photoshop notoriously doesn’t allow you to do this automatically. Still, it is simple to add these bleed marks and margins manually or add them in using other software later. This simple tutorial will help with ensuring designs in Photoshop are print-ready.
Need to Know More About Print Bleed?
If you are working with professional printers, they are best placed to help you ensure your design is well set up to work on their printers. As long as you have a basic understanding of what print bleed is and how to work with it, then your designs can be adapted to print with a fantastic professional finish.
Tony Hunt is a seasoned Print Industry Expert with over three decades of experience in the trade. He has been instrumental in helping clients expand their product ranges, secure more business, and ultimately increase their profitability. Tony’s approach is characterised by enthusiasm and passion, balanced with a realistic and tactical mindset. His expertise is further bolstered by seven years of running his own business, fostering a commercially-driven perspective. An excellent communicator, Tony prides himself on never compromising on detail.