What is Bleed?
Why your design needs breathing room
What is bleed?
Bleed is the area of your design that extends beyond the final trim edge. When we print your artwork, sheets are cut to size using industrial blades — and no blade is 100% perfect.
Without bleed, even a tiny shift during cutting would leave a thin white strip along one edge. Bleed gives us a safety buffer: your background color or image extends past the cut line, so the finished piece looks clean and edge-to-edge no matter what.
Bleed
3mm extra on all sides
Trim
Final cut size
Safe
5mm inside trim
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The three zones
Every print file has three invisible boundaries:
Bleed zone — extends 3mm beyond the trim on all four sides. Fill this with your background — it gets cut off.
Trim line — the exact edge where the blade cuts. This is your final product size (e.g. 90×55mm for a business card).
Safe zone — 5mm inside the trim line. Keep all important content here: text, logos, phone numbers. Anything closer to the edge risks being clipped.
How to add bleed
Most design tools make this easy:
Canva — go to File → Download → tick "Crop marks and bleed" (3mm is added automatically).
Adobe Illustrator — File → Document Setup → set Bleed to 3mm on all sides. Make sure your background extends into the red bleed area.
Procreate — manually add 6mm to both width and height (3mm per side). For A4: use 216×303mm instead of 210×297mm.
When exporting, always include crop marks so we know where to cut.
Quick rule of thumb
Add 3mm bleed on every side. Keep text 5mm inside the trim. If your design has a background color or image that goes to the edge — it needs bleed. If it's white/blank edges — bleed is less critical but still recommended.