Small-Format Printing: What are Crop Marks & Bleed?

If there’s one thing I wish every designer learned in school, it’s this. I’ve been in printing since 1992, and I’m seeing more files come in without crops and bleed than ever before. That includes files from people fresh out of design school. They learned how to design, but nobody taught them how to set a file up for print. It’s not their fault. It’s just a gap. So let’s fill it.

What is bleed?

Bleed is extra image or background that extends past the edge of your finished piece. When we print, we print on a larger sheet and then cut it down to size. No cutter is perfect to the thousandth of an inch, and paper can shift slightly in the stack. If your background color or photo stops exactly at the edge of your design, any tiny shift can leave a thin white sliver along the edge.

Bleed solves that. You extend anything that touches the edge past the cut line, so when we trim, we’re cutting through color, not into white paper.

How much bleed do I need?

One-eighth of an inch (0.125″) on every side is the minimum. For a standard 3.5″ x 2″ business card, that means your file with bleed is actually 3.75″ x 2.25″. The extra gets trimmed off, and you get exactly what you saw on screen.

What are crop marks?

Crop marks are small lines outside the corners of your design that show us exactly where to cut. We want you to include them. Every major design program, whether it’s Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, or Canva, has an option for this when you save your file as a PDF. You turn on crop marks, set your bleed to one-eighth inch, and you’re done. It takes about ten seconds once you know where it is. If you can’t find it, call us. We walk people through it over the phone all the time.

What about the safe area?

Bleed handles the outside. The safe area handles the inside. Keep important things like text, logos, and phone numbers at least a quarter inch in from the trim edge. An eighth of an inch works if you’re tight on space, but I wouldn’t go any closer.

There’s a design reason too. Even if something trims cleanly, text crowded right up against the edge of the paper just doesn’t look right. Give it some breathing room.

What happens if I don’t include them?

It depends on the product. With a business card, we really only have two options: you send us a new file with crops and bleed, or we enlarge your file to about 101% so the color reaches the edge. That works, but now you’re not getting your true design. Everything has been blown up slightly, and things near the edge can get cut.

Booklets are a bigger problem. When a saddle-stitched booklet is folded and stapled, the inside pages actually push out farther than the outside pages. It’s called creep. To make the booklet look clean, we trim the open edge flat, and that trim takes more off the inner pages. If you have page numbers or content sitting close to that edge with no bleed or margin, we’re going to cut into it. There’s no way around it.

The short version

• Add one-eighth inch (0.125″) bleed on all sides
• Turn on crop marks when you save your PDF
• Keep text and logos at least a quarter inch from the trim edge

Do those three things and your file is ready for print. If you’re not sure your file is set up right, send it over and we’ll take a look before anything goes to press.