Let It Bleed!

In my quest to demystify the arcane world of Graphic Design and Printing, I have asked myself “what is the one thing which you, Bob Ray Starker, professional Prepress person, wish the general print buying public had a more comprehensive grasp of? What single thing about preparing a document for print do most people (professional designers included) screw up simply because they have no understanding of it, and in most cases don’t even recognize its necessity?”

After many long hours of intensive thought, I have arrived at the following answer:

Crops & Bleeds.

If those two words bring to mind sweet corn and excessive hemorrhaging, you are not a graphics person. Never fear. Sit tight, read on, and let me catch you up to speed. First, some back story, and then a few useful definitions...

A printed piece can run one of two ways; either “to size” or “oversize”. If you’re having flyers printed, and you want them to end up standard letter size (8.5” x 11”), and you have no text or images closer than a quarter inch to the edge of the sheet, your job can run to size, requiring no trimming after it comes off the press. Congratulations, you have avoided the need to account for crops & bleeds.

If you’re printing something smaller than that sheet size (like business cards (usually 3.5” x 2”) which are often printed 8 or 10 at a time on a standard letter size sheet of paper) or something with images that extend all the way to the edge of the sheet (like most magazine covers, which are printed on a larger sheet with the image being slightly bigger than the intended final size so that the excess can be trimmed off after printing), then you’ll need to know a little something about crops and bleeds.

Crop marks are small vertical and horizontal lines (also known as hash marks) that are printed at the corners of an image to let the person running the paper cutter know where your final document should be trimmed. If your artwork doesn’t include them it will make someone who operates a machine with an exceptionally large, sharp blade very, very angry. That, as a rule of thumb, is never good. There are a couple of different ways to get these marks to appear on your artwork, and we’ll cover that later.

Bleed is the part of your image that extends beyond the crop marks and is larger than the intended final size of your finished document. The total bleed area is usually a quarter of an inch larger than your final document size. This gives the paper cutter an extra eighth of an inch of excess image to trim off, which is the only way to get your image to “run off” the edge of the sheet. To put it another way, if your final document size is standard letter size (8.5” x 11”) then your image size, including bleeds, should be a quarter of an inch larger in both directions (8.75” x 11.25”). If your letter sized document doesn’t include that extra bleed area, the person running the paper cutter will, again, become very angry, and will have no choice but to trim an eighth of an inch off the edges of your document (making it 8.25” x 10.75”) and that’s not what you wanted. Now you are angry, and the cutter is very angry, and one or both of you will yell at the prepress person (me) and that will make me drink.

Do you need that sort of emotional stress in your life? No. Neither do I.

In the next post I’ll tell you how to avoid this regrettable situation.