What is Bleed | How to add Bleed & Why

July 29, 2017

What is Bleed | How to add Bleed & Why

What is bleed:

Bleed is a form of printing that allows an artwork designer to print beyond the edges of a sheet. Bleed is simply the area that is trimmed off. This improves the quality of your work. The best part is that it can be incorporated into your work easily. Sometimes the background colors and artwork can reach the bleed area. Bleed printing allows the printer to account for design inconsistencies and movement of paper. After the sheet is trimmed, the bleed guarantees that no unprinted or white border edges will occur in the final document.

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Why add bleed:

So why should you incorporate bleed and what will happen if you don’t? Imagine yourself designing a poster for an upcoming event. It has all the details of the event including a nice title and a big picture in the middle and they are sitting on a blue background. You send the document to your printer which does not alert you that bleed is missing from the file. After printing you realize that your poster has white strips on the edges, which is rather disappointing. This happens because your printer finds it difficult to trim the files without leaving a white edge. In other words, your artwork is not giving the printer even the slightest tolerance to work with.

Bleed Guideline :

When adding bleed, it is important to introduce margins in your document. Sometimes work can be designed without margins to meet varying design needs. Margins act as an extension of your bleed area inside the artwork. This is an area that you should avoid from including content because it might show up very close to your edges when the trimming has been done. However if the product is large you can include a larger margin to add a little touch to your final document.

The bleed area can extend 3mm around the edges of your artwork or design, there you should ensure that your artwork flows beyond the boarders to make it a seamless piece. Think of bleed as merely coloring beyond the lines that you wish to trim. As you do your bleed printing it is important to note that anything that appears in the bleed area will be cut off and will therefore not appear in the final product. As such you should have images and background colors in this area.

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