Basic Bleed Techniques in Design and Print

What makes a printed piece leap off a page?

Some say it’s the dimensions of the designs, the vibrant hues of the ink, or the dazzling gloss finishes. But part of the beauty is the way the layout itself captures your eye. When white space is appropriately utilized (or eliminated completely), the contrast can be breathtaking. But often clients don’t understand the technical details of planning for appropriate margins, through the use of full or partial bleeds.

A Common Mistake Worth Correcting

One of the most frequent amateur design mistakes is allowing for insufficient bleeds before sending a project to print, causing the effectiveness of the design to be weakened or essential parts of the layout to be cut off unexpectedly.

This month’s print tip, added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, coaches your clients on the basics of bleed techniques in print.

The August print tip article trains your customers on eliminating unwanted white space and understanding trim and fold markings as you build a print proof together.

Though today’s software offers default values for creating bleed margins, here are a few tips to coach clients on when to use them:

• Bleeds work well if your design has a full-colored background.
• Use bleeds to bring letters or images to the edge of a piece without the risk of cutting them off. If you’re creating a project with an exact border, a bleed is often unnecessary.
• If you’re printing a booklet or something that is going to be folded, you’ll certainly want bleeds along interior borders. Bleeds help layouts flow cleanly from one page to the next and colors to “meet in the middle” of the folded areas.

Keep Your Clients Coming Back

Want to save your customers time and money while creating the best print projects possible?

They will thank you with their repeated business! Check out this tip on one of our demo websites or give us a call at (701) 241-9204 or (800) 736-0688 to chat about our no-risk website trials.