What is bleed?

“I VANT TO TRIM YOUR BLEEEEDS!”

While they might sound like the insatiable desire of a Count Dracula-type, “bleeds” are about as gory as Count von Count from Sesame Street. This common printing practice is how we achieve a juicy and delicious edge-to-edge finish on posters, ads, brochures, and more. Bleeds are the additional dimensions added to the desired finished size of a print document that allow extra room for design elements to extend beyond the “safe zone.” You’ll want to add 1/8” to 1/4” of extra space to each side of your Nosferatu movie poster design to allow ample space for all the ominous shadows to drip off the edges. The design is then printed on sheets of paper larger than desired and the excess printed area is sliced off to achieve the correct finished size with a very polished look.

Bleeds are one important aspect of what’s considered a “print-ready” file. Much like how Professor Van Helsing never leaves home without a wooden stake, a crucifix, or a clove of garlic, print-ready files always need to be triple-checked for appropriate bleeds, trim marks, resolution, and color profiles. Trim marks are added to each corner of a print-ready file to indicate where the bleeds should be trimmed for the finished size. When creating a print-ready file, also make sure the resolution is high-quality, the colors are set in CMYK, the file format is correct, and any necessary type is converted from fonts to outlines.

Not using bleeds is as much of a dead giveaway of something strange and unusual as sharp fangs, pointy ears, and a long cape. Paper shifting during the printing process could leave bleed-less documents with tacky blank slivers along the trimmed edge. And the last thing you vant is to be mistaken for some kind of barbaric werewolf!