Bleed and Margins

Bleed — It starts with the knife

The pink of early dawn fades gently from our parking lot here in Tucson. Inside the print shop you can hear a curious sound, the whine of a hydraulic clamp followed by a sort of zipping sound. The zipping sound is really where the action is.  Commercial paper cutters are the big daddy of the guillotine paper cutter in Mrs. Grenwell’s second grade class. You remember it.  A big square of wood  marked off in inches (or centimeters, perhaps) with an 18” long blade held by a pivot. Only the teacher’s aide and Sally Perovskite, the teacher’s pet, could use the cutter.  Sally lorded that power.   In contrast, the commercial paper cutter pounces on the stack of paper with its clamp and its blade slides effortlessly through a thousand sheets at a time. A lion pinning an ibex to the ground. Modern paper cutters do have all sorts of harebrained safety mechanisms to protect the operator.  It’s a good thing, and nicknames like “Lefty” are fewer and farther between these days.

The cut, usually several, takes a stack of unruly printed matter and makes it into the work of art that you and your designer wanted.  What it also does is put a little magic trick into the hands of the designer. Not only can your designer feel free to design foil business cards, letterpress wedding invitations or even premium stationary, they can design to the very edge with us.

A press, be it digital or traditional, cannot print to the edges of the paper.  Well, that’s sort of a lie, they could — anything can be tweaked, but then ink or toner goes onto the rollers, and your paper comes out like it’s been living in the bottom of a ten year old’s backpack. 

If you want a design to go all the way to the edges, then you are in bleed territory, overshoot the finished dimensions with your design and the cutter will finish the illusion. 

It’s pretty straightforward, and if all you want is the nitty gritty, here it is:

Standard bleed: 0.125" (⅛ inch). About 0.25” for large format printing.

• • In InDesign: Set bleed in the New Document window  

• In Illustrator: Set bleed on Document Setup  
• In PDF export: Ensure bleed and (crop) marks are included

What are the bleed settings in Canva or Word?  What are you? 10? Canva does allow you to “show print bleed” in the File menu. We’re not even talking to you if you’re a designer using Word for setting your print jobs (okay, it’s in the print settings, advanced output, marks and bleeds, Allow Bleeds and Bleed Marks. But really! Stop using Word for graphic layout). 

What should I consider in my design?

If you want your design to go all the way to the edge of the paper you’ll want to design with that in mind.  Your bleed is not included in the final product.  It’s like a poodle before going to the groomer. The groomer cuts away everything that is not poodle to get the right pom-poms.  We cut away everything that isn’t your design to arrive at your paper pom-pom.

The most hard-core pop-pom is the full bleed, all edges need bleed measurements added to the design. That means one-quarter inch horizontal and one-quarter inch vertical added to your design’s finished size. 

And you have to tell us that you want bleed.  The groomer doesn’t know how prissy your poodle needs to be, and neither do we.

Visualize a finished design

I would love to pile on to my poodle analogy, I feel sort of daring and edgy, and extending the analogy might scratch that itch. The analogy breaks down at this point because the poodle doesn’t contain “information” or “important graphic elements.” Your design, presumably, does. If that element is important keep it away from the finished edge. Is it going to be mailed? Is there enough space, after the trim, for the logo, the address, the text, the picture of the owner’s wife and poodle. We’re very good at cutting, but putting anything right on the bleed is asking for trouble. The smallest of variations in the printed material, an absolute certainty in all print technologies. The subsequent crappy end product should not be why you wish I would just go back to poodle analogies.