Now, what is the use of bleed in printing? Bleed is the extra 3mm around the outside edge of your document | artwork that will be cut off during digital print production.

Why is bleed in printing important? If you discover a thin white line at the edge of your print upon receiving it, you must have forgotten to include a printing bleed in your artwork.

When you have a leaflet professionally printed and it has an image or background that goes to the edge of the paper you will need to add 3mm “bleed” to your artwork. This means that the image is slightly bigger than the finished size of your document. In digital printing, we print your slightly oversized prints (this is true as well in double sided digital printing) and then guillotine the printed pages through the bleed to make the finished size. This means that our machines (which have a tolerance of +/- 0.75mm) can produce clean cut prints without leaving a slither of white showing – which is a common problem when we print with no bleed.

The main difference between a professionally printed and home printed flyer is this ability to print right to the edge of the paper using bleed. Coupled with the additional choice of printing paper | stock the simple use of bleed in setting up your artwork means that you can get professionally produced digital prints that immediately differentiate your printing from your competitors that are using home printed leaflets with white edges.

It is essential to have bleed in printing almost all types of paper print products including business cards, posters, stapled booklets and even roller banners.



As you can see from the image from our designer software we have automatically added 3mm bleed to your artwork canvas. The business card finished dimension is 85mm x 55mm but the canvas is 88mm x 58mm. The red line depicts the “cut line” and anything outside it “the bleed” will be cut off by our guillotine. If you want a coloured background or a background image please ensure you fill the whole artwork canvas so that we have the right amount of bleed to work with.

The green line depicts the “safe zone” – i.e. any text in your artwork should lie within the safe area – this will not be in danger of being cut off during print production.