The safe area: why your text got trimmed off

How much margin you actually need

Three millimetres inside the trim is the working minimum for sheet-fed work. On an 89 × 51 mm visiting card that leaves an 83 × 45 mm live area — which sounds tight but is more than enough for a name, a role and three lines of contact detail.

Bound or folded items need more on the binding edge, because the fold takes up space and the innermost pages sit slightly further in.

The mistakes we see most

A phone number set flush to the bottom edge because it looked balanced on screen. A logo positioned in a corner with 1 mm of clearance. A border drawn exactly on the trim line, which is the worst case of all — any drift makes the border thicker on one side than the other, and the eye notices asymmetry immediately.

• Keep all text at least 3 mm from the cut.
• Avoid thin borders that follow the trim. They advertise any misalignment.
• Centre-align critical content rather than pinning it to an edge.

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.
• Product Labels — 50 × 50 mm finished, 2 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹3 per unit with a minimum of 100.

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.