Various Articles

Back from the break! Yes, we're knuckling down into the second Biggest Design Problem. In fact "Knuckling down" may not be that far off topic! Cause we're gonna talk about drawing some blood...

Or more accurately "bleeding your document"!

Design Problem #2 is "No Bleed in the Document"!

You mean I gotta give blood to get a print job out? Yeah, some of the terms in the industry can be pretty unusual! Bleed is when the background graphic or image of a document extends outside the finished size of the printed product to allow for variance in the cutting process.

Guilotines and Book Cutters (regardless what brand or how expensive they are) can't cut every sheet in exactly the same position. There is some movement in the process. To compensate for this variation we bleed the background over the edge of the document, so if the cutter, cuts slightly bigger you won't get the dodgy result of 'white paper' on the edge of it!

So how to do it?

Now if you have a document which has a background that you wish to run right to the edge of the paper, you will need to make the background go even further past the edge of the document. It should be at least 3-5mm. If it's a business card or brochure 3mm is fine, but if it's a magazine it should be 5mm. 5mm would be fine for all products. (The more the merrier!)

Now, it's important to note that this is for EVERY SINGLEedge of the paper! So you would have 5mm going past the TOP of your document, 5mm going past the BOTTOM of your document, 5mm going past the LEFT SIDE of your document, 5mm going past the RIGHT SIDE of your document.

Child's play huh?

Yeah we think so! But weirdly enough many people overlook it or misunderstand it.

I know that you wouldn't make that mistake, don't I? (wink, wink, nod, nod!)

I'll give you a hint what the next article is...The reverse of bleed....