Printer’s jargon: Bleed

My printer’s yelling ‘bleed’ at me, what have I done wrong?

Relax, it’s pretty unlikely that your chosen printer actually wants to hurt you (unless they have REALLY high expectations of their clients.) ‘Bleed’ is one of those terms that’s instantly recognisable to anyone who has worked with print before, but leaves anyone outside the industry stumped. Here at Pulse Print UK we want to help de-mystify printing for those not lucky enough to work in the business, so that you get perfect print every time.

Ok, so what’s a bleed?

Essentially, its an extension of your design that is intended to be cut off before the product is delivered to you.
This might sound confusing, in which case you should probably read on!

First off, you’ll need to know a little bit about how commercial printing works. We’ll assume that you want 5000 Heavyweight A6 Flyers printed as an example, but what follows is true of pretty much all printed products. As always, if you’re not sure, give us a call on (01865) 304 071 or head over to our contacts page and we’ll walk you through the process.

So, these flyers. The chances are that you’ve not seen a commercial printing press in action (although you may have checked out the video guide to magazine printing elsewhere on this site). If that’s the case there’s no need to worry, but just remember that a commercial press isn’t just a large-scale version of your desktop printer. One of the key differences is in the way that paper is supplied to the printing mechanism; at home you’ll likely have a stack of pre-cut A4 paper that you load into the bottom of the printer to be taken up sheet by sheet as you print. While this is fine for working at home it’s neither cost-effective, easily stored, nor quick enough when you start talking about lithographically or digitally printing thousands of products each day (think about how long your inkjet takes to produce a single full colour page – now imagine asking it to do that 5000 times…)

To keep costs down, a commercial printer will keep commonly used stocks (more jargon – it means ‘papers‘) either on tightly bound rolls or, less often, in huge single sheets. Your 5000 flyers won’t be printed on 5000 individual sheets of A6 card, but on a single sheet which will then be trimmed down to the right size at the end of the process. It’s this trimming process that makes a bleed absolutely necessary.

No matter how much we refine the print process, it can’t ever be made perfect. Paper is shuttling out of the print mechanism and into the cutter at a phenomenal speed, which means that a printer has a choice between slowing the process down to a crawl (which means you can wave goodbye to a decent turnaround time) or building an insurance policy into the process. Including a bleed on your artwork is this insurance policy – it will mean that you get perfect print every time, rather than risking borders that you didn’t want:

Adding a bleed to your design.

It’s a really simple process, and you should be thinking about it when you start doing your design. Speak to your printers early in the process and ask them what size bleed they require for your product. This can actually be a good way of gauging the quality of the printer you’ve chosen, as the better the printer the smaller the bleed they’ll require. The best printers will only need a 3mm bleed on most products (that’s 3mm on each side of the design), so if they ask for anything more you should perhaps be asking why they can’t deal with the industry standard – if they can’t give you a convincing answer then it might be worth looking for an alternative supplier.

When you start your design, size your document to the correct dimensions (A6 flyers are 105x148mm) and then add 6mm to both the height and width (that’s 3mm on both sides). So your A6 flyers will be 111x154mm with bleed. Some programs (Adobe InDesign is the standard) will ask you if you want to add a bleed when you open a new document:

If you can’t see the bleed & slug option click the button that says ‘More options’. It says ‘Fewer options’ in our image because we’ve already got all the options showing.

Simply tell InDesign that you want a 3mm (or whatever your printer has asked for) bleed on all sides and it will add a red box outside the limits of your document that shows you where the bleed extends to. Other programs, like Photoshop, aren’t as helpful – you’ll have to create the document at the correct size with bleed and then drag guides onto the document from the rulers at the side and top to remind you where the bleed area is. If you’re confused at this stage, give us a call on (01865) 304 071 and we’ll walk you through it.

What goes in the bleed?

Remember that the bleed area is designed to be cut off of the finished artwork – it’s just there to help the cutting mechanism line itself up. Therefore you shouldn’t put anything in the bleed area that you want to appear on your printed product (telephone numbers, emails, or any other details). What should be extending into the bleed is any image, background, or fill that is intended to extend right to the edge of your flyer. It really is as simple as that!

What if I don’t include a bleed?

It might be that you’ve already made your design up, and are only finding out that you should have included a bleed once it’s too late to resize everything. A friendly printer, like Pulse Print UK, will do what they can to help you out, but realistically the best that anybody is going to be able to do is enlarge the artwork you’ve supplied so that it’s big enough to be trimmed. This can lead to problems with resolution, which can make your printed design look pixelated. It can also lead to problems if you’ve got details that were already close to the edges of your design – that telephone number you put right at the bottom may well end up being cut off after all! A bleed is something that should really be added at the beginning of the process, trying to put it in once the whole design is done is generally a nightmare (incidentally, this sort of problem is as good a reason as any to consider getting your design done by a professional, 90% of the time it’s worth the little extra money you have to spend to be sure that you get something that looks great and won’t cause any delays in your printing).

In summary…

• Make sure that you ask your printer what bleed they require before you start your design. If you haven’t picked a printer yet assume that 3mm on all sides will be what you need (and get in touch with us!)

• Make sure that anything you want to extend all the way to the edge of your print product when you get it back extends all the way to the edge of the bleed when you send it to the printers.

• Keep anything that’s really important (contact details, logos, that kind of thing) away from the edge of the printable area. If it’s right at the limit of the printing area you could risk having a bit of it chopped off.

• Before you send anything to the printers, it’s worth having a final check that you’ve got everything right. Have a quick read of our guide to preparing your artwork for print.