Bleeds on Artwork
LET IT BLEED
In printing terminology 'bleed' has no connection with a loss of blood - nor surprisingly does it mean that the ink has run on a printed page while the paper was running on the printing press.
Bleed when referred to by a designer, printer or publication simply means the printed area that runs beyond the finished size of a printed page. This allows the design of a document to extend right up to the edges of the finished paper size and can be used to improve the visual appearance of the page. Without bleed the text and images will be restricted to blocks with borders around the entire contents of a page. By using bleed will extend the page contents right to the edges of the page. Bleed is used on the majority of printed work including leaflets, magazines and books, particularly for photographs, drawings and other images as well as page background designs so that they extend to the edges without any borders.
There are two kinds of bleed; full or partial. With full bleed the contents of the printed page will run to the edges on all sides; with partial bleed only some of the content of the page will be extended to the edges of the paper.
The use of bleed also offers some leeway to the printer by allowing a small amount of space to account for any movement of the paper during the printing process. Bleed ensures that no unprinted edges will appear in the final print work.
At the proofing stage of a print job you will notice crop on all four edges of the document. Everything WITHIN the trim marks should appear on the page of the final document - anything outside the trim marks will be lost when the document is trimmed to size. It is therefore essential to keep anything that you do not wish to lose from the final print work to be kept within the area determined by the crop marks, especially type.
In the UK (and Japan) the standard amount of bleed on a document will be 3mm on EACH edge. Other countries may differ slightly including the USA that still uses imperial measurements. Your printer will advise how much bleed to add to your document. With most industry standard software design packages bleed marks will be added automatically when you open a new page. Adobe InDesign, for example does this for you but in Adobe Photoshop you will need to add the bleed excess manually by increasing the document size when you open a new document by adding 6 mm to the width and the same to the height (ie: 3 mm for each edge of the document).
