Let’s say you’re designing a Postcard and want the imagery to go right to the edge of the card as in most postcards. No white border, or blank space between the imagery and the edge of the postcard. Although this is very simple, to achieve it you’ll use what printers call “Bleed”. Despite how painful and unpleasant it sounds, using bleed just means allowing the imagery to spill (about 1/8”) past the edge of the document. The excess then gets cut off when we trim the Postcard to its correct size.

Here’s an example of a 6” x 4” postcard with bleed on all 4 edges. Let’s assume it will have one background image that covers the whole postcard and has text laid on top of it.:

• Make sure the document size is 6” x 4”
• Make the background image 6.25” x 4.25” (.125 or 1/8” bigger on top, bottom, left and right)
• Align the top left corner of the larger image to a point 1/8” higher and 1/8” to the left of the top left corner of your document
• The background image should now be 1/8 inch larger than the document in all 4 directions.

Important: The parts of the imagery that are beyond the edge of the document will be cut off when the postcard is trimmed to size. It may take some time to become accustomed to designing so that some of your image can be “lost” when cut to size.

Using bleeds is one of the trademarks of professional looking printed design. Become comfortable with incorporating bleeds into the design and you will be surprised at how it changes the look.

Once you understand that design elements that bleed need to be larger than the finished printed piece, an easy mistake is increasing the overall document size. Do not increase the document size.

It can be confusing, but remember that the document size should always be the same size as the final printed piece, and you won’t go wrong. It is the design elements: images, lines, shapes of solid color, etc… that need to extend past the edge of the document if you want a bleed.

Images
Both raster and vector images (see Images section of Help Center) need to bleed if you want them stretching to the very edge of your document. The easiest images to forget have lots of white space in them, or are small or very narrow. Check all four edges of your document for images that should bleed.

Lines
Lines are easy to forget especially if they are thin. Make sure lines that bleed stretch 1/8” past the edge of your document border.

Shapes
Triangles, squares, circles and other shapes can be tricky to bleed if only a small part of them is on the document with the rest falling off the edge. For example, in QuarkXPress versions 4.1 and earlier, there is a limited amount of space top and bottom of your document, disallowing large shapes to spill off the top or bottom edges. In this case it may be necessary to recreate a part of shape, like one quarter of a circle, using an illustration program like Adobe Illustrator.

It is easy for designers to forget that size increments in the design are small. Often while fine tuning design elements, a designer will be working at a high magnification like 400% and nudging graphic elements pixel by pixel. It seems like there is plenty of space between a graphic element and the edge of the document. Keep in mind that when it comes to the real world of machines cutting paper, it is wise to leave some small margin of error.

A good rule of thumb is to leave at least 1/16 inch between any important design element and the edge of the document. A good example is letters like “g” or “y”--- if text is close to the edge of the document, the bottoms of these letters should be at least 1/16” from the bottom of the document.