I hate when printers bleed.

If you haven't designed print ready artwork for your flyer printing before then one of the most important factors to take into consideration is printer's bleed. Firstly, you need to understand how a litho printer prints, the following applies to the some of printed stationery; however, as an example: You require 4000 150gsm silk A6 Flyers, these are not printed onto individual A6 pieces of paper like some designers think, instead we print 8 x A6 Flyers onto SRA3 card, this is slightly larger than standard A3 at 450mm x 320mm, we then trim the printed Flyers down to the required A6 size.

So what is a printers bleed?

It is not possible to print all the way to the edge of your A4 Flyers, to achieve this we have to print a larger area than is needed and then trim the paper down to the required size.

Images, background photos and fills which are intended to extend to the edge of your posters must be extended 3mm beyond the cut line to give a bleed. A finished A6 Flyers is 105mm x 148mm, you would assume that your artwork should be the same size, wrong! You need to add a further 3mm onto each edge of the design, this is the bleed, this means your artwork should now be 111mm x 154mm.

What will happen if I don't add a bleed?

There is very small element of movement when trimming artwork, this can be as small as 1mm-2mm, however, this can cause problems. If you supply your A4 Flyers printed artwork at 105mm x 148mm and there is 2mm of movement to the left when trimming, this means that on the left handside of your design will be a 2mm white border, although very small this will still be noticeable and not look good, this scenario also applies to the top and bottom.

Another point to bear in mind is if your content is too close to the trim/cut line, there is a very small chance that it could be cut off, therefore, ensure all content such as text, logos etc sit around 5mm in from the trim / cut line or 8mm in if including the bleed.