Welcome to the first in a series of mini-lessons on printer’s terminology. We’ll start with Bleed a classic term that we get questioned about here at the shop all the time.
Okay, to start, don’t panic. Despite this seemingly menacing name, no one will be getting hurt in this explanation – we think.
Bleed is actually very important for getting your final product to look just the way you want it. Simply put, it is excess areas of color/ink along the edges of your artwork, that can be trimmed off in production. This ensures that you have beautiful edges on your finished piece.
Lets take a look at an example.
Here we have a new business card design for Wally’s Widgets. The designer has chosen a nice blue PMS color for the background of the card that runs right to the edges. Although this looks great on screen, the file here has no bleed, and this will affect the finished product.
So what do I mean? Well, remember that every business card will be printed on a piece of paper bigger than its actual size. After being printed the card will be cut to its final size, or what we call “finish size.” Without that excess bleed around the edges, the final cut could end up with a thin white line around it. Like this.
White paper showing through around the edges. That’s right, without bleed there is no flexibility for the pressman and cutter operator to get the background color to fill the entire space. So, when cutting the final product to the finish-size the card may shift and expose some of the white paper around the design.
So how does bleed stop this? Lets take a look. Below you can see two details of the lower left corner of the design. Notice the placement of the crop marks.
Without Bleed
In this first image the designer didn’t place the design past the crop marks. This increases the chance of having ugly edges.
With Bleed
In the second image we have a full fourth of an inch of bleed. This little bit of extra space on the outside of a design allows enough room for the cutter operator to trim the cards to perfection.
Although most of our machines have fairly good registration in aligning images, bleed gives just enough leeway to avoid problems. This is especially important when having something printed digitally, because the heat involved in creating the image can sometimes stretch of shrink you image very slightly.
In future installments on this blog we will be looking at ways of creating bleed with common software. So stay tuned!
