blog.advantagedigitalmedia.co.uk

Bleed - What Is It & Why Do I Need It?

This is, bar none, the most common issue raised with artwork that we deal with. A lot of people struggle to understand why we need it and in fact what it is to start with. In this article I will explain in depth what Bleed is used for in printing and exactly why we need it.

Firstly, when work is printed, it’s not printed 1 on a sheet. It’s printed several on a sheet. This value we label “up”. So, if you can get four A5 sized documents on an A3 sheet that would be “4-up”, if you put eight A6 sized documents on an A3 sheet, that would be “8-up” and so on and so forth. When these are printed, no matter whether they are double or single sided, the press (more so in digital) can mis-register. That means that it might not print each and every sheet in exactly the same place. Below is an example of what I mean, like they say, pictures say a thousand words!

The first picture shows you a group of A6’s (all the same file) imposed 8-up onto an SRA3 sheet with crop marks ready for print. The 8 individual items cannot move on the sheet, but the 8 items as a group can move up 1mm in any direct. If bleed isn’t used, and the crop marks are directly on the edge of a document, which is then trimmed, the results are in picture 2. You can see how some have a red border some have a white border and some have no border at all. This is why we use bleed.

We use a 3-box setup in a program called InDesign by Adobe. We set our bleed area to 3mm larger all the way round. This increases the finished document size to 6mm larger in both proportions, for instance, an A6 finished size flyer is 148×105mm. A bleed size A6 would be 154×111mm. NO text or image must be placed within this 3mm border as it will be discarded, it is there to combat the above mentioned issues when trimming.

Picture 3 shows you how we setup our documents for print with the necessary boxes in place to ensure aesthetically pleasing print and easy trimming. If you don’t use InDesign and use a different imaging software to create your artwork, this isn’t a problem. Provided you make your image 6mm bigger than what it should be, and put nothing within 8mm of the edge on any side, there are no issues! We will then bin the 3mm excess on each edge and you get a correct sized finished document with nothing missing or no amateurish white edges or borders!

There are some templates available for you to use on our website, click here for more details!