We want to make buying print online easy for everyone. To help cut through the jargon, I’ve defined all the terms you might have heard relating to bleed in printing and how to set them up for your artwork when you choose to print with us.
What is Bleed Area?
Due to cost and speed, we print all of your artwork on large sheets, then trim them down to size with a guillotine. Trimming isn’t exact – sometimes it’s a mm here or there. The bleed area is a thin border around your artwork that helps make sure there are no white borders from the sheet left over after trimming.
If you want your artwork to go to the edge of the page (with no white border), you will need to extend your design to fill the bleed area. I’d recommend you use the background image or colour. This area will be trimmed from your final document to eliminate any unwanted borders.
Bleed area can be different depending on the product you want, but is usually 3mm on top of the product’s finished size. For example, standard business card size is 85mm x 55mm. With bleed, your artwork size will be 91mm x 61mm. Choose the product you’d like on our website and you’ll be able to find the bleed size in the product specifications.
If you need help setting up your design, we hare here to help emailartwork@valprints.co.uk