Bleed & 'Quiet Border'

Understanding the need for Bleed and a Quiet Border is vital if, as partners, we are going to achieve our joint aim of an excellent finished print job. We require Bleed to allow for the tolerance of our guillotines (the machine used for cutting your job after printing). Even with our state of the art equipment there is a margin of error with the operation.

If your image finishes exactly at the edge of your required finished size then these small deviations may produce unsightly white flashes at the edge of your print. By extending your background colour or image beyond the edge of your finished job the effects of the same deviations are not noticeable.

We recommend that elements intended to go to the very edge of your finished job should extend 3mm beyond the edge.

A Quiet Border is the distance you should allow from the edge of your finished page size for text, diagrams or images not going to bleed. The reason for the border is again the tolerance in cutting. If you have a design where the text runs to the very edge then any cutting deviation will result in some of your text being cut off!!

With a very small Quiet Border even the smallest cutting deviation could result in the finished job looking uneven. We recommend a Quiet Border where there is no text etc. of at least 5mm around the edges of your job.

‘Professional’ design programmes, such as Indesign, Illustrator or Corel Draw allow elements to extend beyond the size of the page. This makes it very easy to bleed backgrounds and pictures beyond the trimmed edge.

With other programmes bleeding beyond the boundaries of the page is not possible (Such as with Microsoft Word). However it is still possible to create a page with bleed using these programmes! This is achieved by setting up pages which are 6mm bigger than the required sheet size in each dimension. (E.g. for a required finished size of A4 (210mm x 297mm) set up your page to be 216mm x 303mm. Next make your background image extend to the edge of this bigger sheet size. In effect this is then ‘bleeding’ 3mm beyond the edge of the required page on all sides. Ensure that any element which you do not wish to bleed is at least 8mm inside the extended page edges (3mm of bleed plus 5mm of quiet border). When the PDF is created it will be fully compliant with the bleed and quiet border requirements. See Preparing you PDF for details