Handling Bleeds Like A Pro

Definition:
Any image, text, or colored area that extends all the way to the edge of a printed piece is said to bleed off the edge. These edges, in turn, are called "bleed edges," "bleeding edges," or "bleeds," for short.

What is so special about bleeds?
There is nothing special about a bleed until it's time to trim your job to the correct size. In every step of the printing process, a tiny bit of variation is introduced. On the press, each sheet is extremely similar to the sheet before it, but the placement of the ink can vary from one sheet to the next. Generally, the difference between one sheet and the next must be measured in hundredths of an inch using a loupe.

After printing, jobs are often folded. Folding adds a little more variance to a job, typically in the range of 1/64" to 1/32" per fold. So, when a job is roll folded, or folded in thirds, or quarter-folded, an imperfection of as much as 1/16" may be introduced, in addition to the sheet-to-sheet variance on press.

A job may also be scored or perforated, each of which can introduce even more variance. And after that, folded or perfed sheets might be gathered and bound into covers, which is yet another cause for variation.

At the very last step, just before the job gets boxed and shipped, the pieces must be cut with a hydraulic knife. At this point, all those tiny variations have added up into a significant amount of variance. All printers strive to eliminate as many variables as possible, but, at this last step, each piece might "wander" as much as 1/8" from the perfect expected output.

That 1/8" is why we ask for bleeds to be extended past the borders of the printed piece.

Bleed-related problems
Incorrect handling of bleeds results in one particular problem - white edges. When a job makes it all the way to the press without bleeds,then it begins it journey through bindery and cutting. If the cutter cuts the piece to its exact specifications (for instance 8.5 x 11) a job with insufficient bleeds will ALWAYS have a tiny white edge on one side of the bleed image, and a clean cut on the opposite side. This tiny white space can be embarrasing for a designer, because it suddenly makes a pro piece look a little amateurish, and is obviously an error.

Errors like this may also appear in die-cut pieces, which can really ruin the painstaking work and significant expense put into these projects.

Avoiding Bleed Issues
The most important step in avoiding bleeding issues is to understand that printers can't offer you perfection. With this in mind, it's a lot easier to let go of some of your notions about how a job must be, and to help us by providing a little room for error.

Photographers in particular can be very demanding about cropping. But you have to understand the limitations of mass-production. If exact cropping is needed, consider running an image without bleeding it off of the edge. For most flat pieces, there is actually very little variance in the cutting stage, so, for these pieces you can generally feel safe if you provide 1/16th of an inch of bleed.

On the other side of cut, there is an issue called "Safe Area." The safe area is an invisible box inside the finished size of your piece that should be seen as the internal boundary for important visual data. For most printed jobs, we recommend a safe area margin of about 1/4". The ensures that no text or faces will ever be clipped, and that internal spacing will seem consistent.

Please note that all of these measurements are presented with the idea in mind that the reader will be having a job printed using a sheet-fed offset or digital press. Much wider margins and bleeds are required for web presses and flexography. Please talk to your printer about these issues before submitting a job.