Printer’s Bleed
If you haven’t designed print ready artwork before then one of the most important factors to take into consideration is printer’s bleed.

Firstly, you need to understand how a commercial printer prints, the following applies to the majority of printed products, however, as an example:

You require 5,000 300gsm A6 Flyers, these are not printed onto individual A6 pieces of card like some people think, instead we print 8 x A6 Flyers onto SRA3 card, this is slightly larger than standard A3 at 450mm x 320mm, we then trim the printed Flyers down to the required A6 size.

So what is a bleed?
It is not possible to print all the way to the edge of your A6 Flyers, to achieve this we have to print a larger area than is needed and then trim the card down to the required size.

Images, background images and fills which are intended to extend to the edge of your Flyer must be extended 3mm beyond the cut line to give a bleed. A finished A6 Flyer is 105mm x 148mm, you would assume that your artwork should be the same size, wrong! You need to add a further 3mm onto each edge of the artwork, this is the bleed, this means your artwork should now be 111mm x 154mm.

What will happen if I don’t add a bleed?
There is very small element of movement when trimming artwork, this can be as small as 1mm-2mm, however, this can cause problems. If you supply your A6 Flyer artwork at 105mm x 148mm and there is 2mm of movement to the left when trimming, this means that on the left handside of your artwork will be a 2mm white border, although very small this will still be noticeable and not look good, this scenario also applies to the top and bottom.

Another point to bear in mind is if your content is too close to the trim/cut line, there is a very small chance that it could be cut off, therefore, ensure all content such as text, logos etc sit around 5mm in from the trim / cut line or 8mm in if including the bleed.

The above is print industry standard and applies to all commercial printing.

TIP: For your convenience we have a wide selection of free print templates that we provide which are already set to the correct sizes and bleed.

As always, if you are based in the UK and have any questions then do not hesitate to get in touch via our main website, or post a comment below.