What is bleed, and why your printer keeps asking for it

The three boxes on every print file

Any print-ready file has three nested rectangles, and confusing them is the most common reason artwork gets sent back.

• Bleed box — the full sheet, 3 mm larger on every edge. For an 89 × 51 mm visiting card that is 95 × 57 mm.
• Trim box — where the blade actually cuts. This is the finished size you ordered.
• Safe area — 3 mm inside the trim. Text and logos live here, nothing else.

What happens when you skip it

Artwork supplied at exact trim size is not rejected outright — if your design has a white border anyway, there is nothing to bleed and it prints perfectly.

The problem is only for designs that run colour or images to the edge. Without bleed, the printer has two bad options: shrink your artwork slightly so it fits inside the cut, which moves everything and can clip text, or print it as-is and accept white edges on part of the run.

Setting it up

In Illustrator or InDesign, set the bleed value in the document setup dialogue and export with "Use Document Bleed Settings" ticked. In Canva, choose the print option that includes crop marks and bleed. In Photoshop, make the canvas 6 mm larger in each dimension than the finished size and pull your background out to the edges.

When you upload to us, our preflight measures the page and tells you which of the three it received before anything reaches a press.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.
• Flyers — 148 × 210 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2.5 per unit with a minimum of 250.
• Posters — 297 × 420 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 200 DPI minimum, from ₹45 per unit with a minimum of 10.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

If something still looks wrong

Preflight catches size, resolution, colour mode and page count automatically, and it errs toward warning rather than refusing — a file that would print acceptably is never blocked just because it is not perfect.

What it cannot judge is whether the design says the right thing. Proofread names, phone numbers and dates with a second pair of eyes before approving, because approval is the point at which the file goes to a press and the cost of a change stops being zero.

Common questions