What are crop marks and bleed?

Bleed is a very important element that must be taken into consideration when creating any printed piece. Bleed refers to any artwork where graphics/info/colour is going to the edge of the page. You must provide 3mm of this content or image outside the cut area. This is done to ensure that there is no white paper showing around the edge of a printed piece. We guillotine through this additional 3mm, to give the perfect full colour, edge to edge final product. We would also advise text and borders etc. be around 5mm away from the edge of the printed piece, this is known as a ‘safe area’.

Crop marks refer to little lines that show the person cutting down each sheet where to cut, these are not typically required, and if they are for your project – we will let you know.