Let it Bleed, Part III

Hi there. In the last two posts I talked a lot about what bleeds are and how to achieve them, but didn’t really address the why of the thing. So why do you want your document to bleed (or not)?

In short, it’s a status thing. A display of perceived wealth and power, a show of financial cojones, a demonstration of your ability to indulge the frivolous... it’s showing off. Stripped down to it’s most basic level, a printed piece is a sheet of paper with some sort of visual information on it. Bleeding that image off the edge of the sheet doesn’t make the text more legible. It doesn’t make the image more recognizable. It doesn’t really do anything but cost more. You’re printing a little extra image on a little extra paper because you want everyone to know you can afford to trim it off and throw it away. It’s a bit like a sandwich with the crusts cut off. Is it better? Depends on who you are and what you value.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s a personal decision. Who are you, what is your message, how do you want to be perceived? If you just need to get your information out there, bleeds are superfluous. On the other hand, if part of your message is “I run such a successful organization that we can afford the best of the best”, then bleeds and any other extra finishing steps might help you blow your audience away. Neither is inherently ‘better’, and either may seem preferable depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s a perfect example of how complex this can be:

Let’s say you’re a non-profit organization devoted to saving the planet, like the Sierra Club, or Greenpeace, or whatever. As a non-profit, you need to solicit huge amounts of dough from contributors great and small, but the big fish are always financially tastier. Conventional wisdom would dictate that any green organization would want to use the least amount of paper possible, and the simplest black & white designs in an effort to use up the fewest natural resources. On the other hand, you need to impress the hell out of people who have access to large amounts of excess cash in order to keep your operation up and running. That means presenting your info in the most professional manner possible which, in the world of printing, means full color photography bleeding off the edges of glossy paper. You have to get their attention because you need their money, and you’re probably going to have to turn around and spend some of it on more flashy presentations to get more of their money to spend on... well, you get the picture. Our society is more than a little out of whack, and values strange things. As a result, those who want to encourage responsible green behavior often have to employ a bit of old-fashioned resource wasting excess just to get potential donors’ attention.

Don’t believe me? Here’s another scenario:

Imagine you’re a six figure upper middle management type (or the dilettante spouse thereof), and you genuinely want to share some of your hard earned largesse with a worthy charitable organization. You’re sipping your half-caff mochaccino latte and sorting the days mail. You find, among the barrage of bills, sorrority/faternity/alumni newsletters and shopping circulars, a black & white hand addressed flier from a local grass roots recycling initiative and a full color glossy tri-fold brochure bar coded mailer with a picture of a happy dolphin bleeding off all four sides of the front panel from... well, whoever, you don’t care anymore, that dolphin looks so happy... The point is, both of these organizations are soliciting a contribution from you, and you’re probably only going to cough up for one of them. Which one will it be? It really depends on who you are and what you value (and how gosh darn happy that dolphin looks).

Your printed piece is a two dimensional representative of you and your message. It's out there in the world, and it needs to tell people exactly what you want them to know about you. At the end of day, any decisions you make about design and printing are up to you, but remember this: no amount of over-the-top production value dazzle or aw-shucks common-as-clay grovelling is any substitute for knowing your audience.

Good luck!

Let It Bleed! Part II

Crops & Bleeds and how to use them...

Let’s say you’re creating artwork for a business card. As I previously explained, business cards are traditionally 3.5” x 2”, and your printer will probably want to run them “8 up” on an 8.5” x 11” sheet. Let’s also say your design includes a background image that bleeds off all four sides of your document, like the following example:

PLEASE NOTE: The above image is only a hypothetical example. I am not actually in the wig game. If you show up at the corner of 4th St. & 5th Ave. and attempt to buy hair or bait from a man in a van, it will not be me, and I cannot guarantee your safety.

Now, let’s design a business card!

Set your document size at 3.5” x 2” with a .125” bleed area. This can all be set in the new document window in InDesign, Illustrator, Quark, or any other design software program. You’ll also want to set a margin of at least .125”. That will keep you from placing any text (like part of your phone #) too close to the edge. When your document opens, it will look like 3 rectangular boxes, one inside of the other. The outer box is the extent of your bleed area (3.75” x 2.25”). The next smallest box is your actual document size (3.5” x 2”). The smallest box (3.25” x 1.75”) is the area in which it is safe to include text, logos, pictures, or anything else that you don’t want to get cut off during trimming.

Create an image frame 3.75” x 2.25”, center it on your document, and import your background image into it, making sure that it fills the entire frame, extending beyond the document edge. Then create a text frame within the 3.25” x 1.75” margin and enter your pertinent info. After you’re satisfied with your layout, sit back, pat yourself on the head, take a few deep breaths and prepare to export your finished artwork. There are a couple of different ways to do this.

If you trust your printer, or don’t trust yourself, or both...

You’ll want to provide your printer with an editable document. You’ll need to include all the fonts you used, and all the original image files you placed in the document (the background image and any logos etc.). InDesign has a ‘Package’ command in the File menu that is excellent for this purpose, and Quark has a 'Collect for Output' command that works just as well. These options will collect all your files into a new folder which can be given to your printer. By providing your original document and all the files it is linked to, you give your printer the ability to edit your files. This is the way to go if you anticipate a future need to update the text in your document, like changing your phone number, or having new cards printed for future employees. In addition, the prepress guy (me) is now responsible for any bleeds or crop mark issues. This is also the way to go if you just can’t get your head around that wacky bleed concept; having access to your original files makes it much easier for the prepress person to fix any design errors you may have missed.

If you trust yourself, or don’t trust your printer, or both...

You’ll want to send an PDF (Portable Document Format) of your artwork to the print shop. There are a lot of advantages to this method. The PDF will not be editable by most print shops (unless they have a program called PitStop which allows for the editing of PDF’s, but is prohibitively expensive for the average user), so the chances of your document being accidentally changed are pretty non-existent. PDF’s generally don’t use up nearly as much memory as your original document, and are often small enough to be sent to your printer as an email attachment. Exporting a PDF is pretty simple. Under the File Menu, choose “Export”, and then choose PDF. In the PDF window, set the preset to either “Print”, “Press”, or “Highest Quality”, depending on what version of the software you have installed on your computer. Then, clink “Marks and Bleeds” in the menu to your left. This is where you tell Acrobat to include crop marks and bleeds. If you set your document up with bleeds, you can just check the box that says “Use document bleed settings”. If not, just set the bleed to .125”. That’s all there is to it, really; just hit ENTER, sit back, and marvel at the miracle of creation (of your Portable Document Format file).

That’s all for now... the next post will most likely contain some more philosophical musings on crops & bleeds (yes, I do muse about just that sort of thing), or answers to your ensuing questions, or both.

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.

Howdy!

Welcome to my blog.

Since there's no telling just who you might be, I'll begin by telling you about about myself, and why I felt compelled to start a' bloggin'...

My name is Bob Ray Starker, and I've worked in the printing business since 1985. Back in the days before desktop publishing I started out doing paste-up with galley type and a waxer, stripping negatives, cutting ruby lith, burning metal plates, and a whole slew of related skills that have since gone the way of the dodo. Since the mid '90s I've worked on Macs and PCs in PageMaker, Quark, InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Word and even (shudder) Microsoft Publisher, all in a never-ending struggle to render everyday citizens' documents printable.

What most folks don't know about printing would fill a library, and frankly, that's OK. There's no real need for normal, well-adjusted people to know anything about Pantone books, color trapping, font substitutions or image densities. I know this stuff because I get paid to. There are much more pleasant things with which to fill your head, and you should do that.

But...

From time to time, many who've had no training in the graphic arts will be called upon by an employer, a relative or plain old necessity to design a business card, newsletter or brochure. It will be daunting. The software will taunt you. You will, more than likely, freak out. That's why I'm writing this blog. If your project hits a wall, please feel free to contact me. I will answer your questions (hopefully within 24 hours or less), give you all the tips and tricks at my disposal, and help you deliver a finished document to the local print shop that will print as flawlessly as their equipment allows. Best of all, the prepress guy (my job) won't curse you behind your back.

So, let me have it... what do you need to know to finish your project? Send your queries, quips and questions to: bobraystarker@yahoo.com

Let's do this thing!

P.S. While I anticipate this being a forum for newcomers with a lot of how-to questions, graphic designers should feel free to browse these missives and hurl a question my way. Honestly, I spend as much time fixing Adobe files submitted by professional designers as I do tweaking Word docs submitted by amateurs. Remember: THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, ONLY STUPID MISTAKES THAT COST TIME AND MONEY. Stupid mistakes also make the prepress guy (me) angry and bitter. If that happens, I might forget to check your crops, bleeds and gripper space. If you don't know what any of that means, we should talk. ;-)