What is bleed and safety margin around the trim on printed material?
Bleed is extending any color, photo, or design elements beyond the trim line as shown in our templates. The printed pieces will be cut in stacks of hundreds of sheets at a time. This stack of paper is manually jogged and there will be a slight difference in position between the top sheet and the bottom sheet. Also as the cutting blade is pressed down the stack, the high shearing pressure will tend to push the paper stack outward even though it is clamped down. Bleed provides a safety margin of error when trimming so that if the cut is a little off, the white of the paper won’t show along the edge. We request you add a minimum of 1/8″ of bleed to your layouts. For example if you have an item that will be trimmed to 4.75″ x 4.75″, you would want to add 1/8″ to all sides for bleed, making the final art size 5″ x 5″ . Each template has guidelines set up so you can see exactly where to apply bleed to your layouts. These are generally the outermost guides. Safety margin is the opposite of bl
