Every print job gets cut, and no cut is perfect. This page shows you — in about three minutes — when your file needs a little extra color around the edge, when it doesn't, and the exact clicks to set it up.
Quick specs
1/8"of extra color past every edge — but only if your artwork goes to the edges
1/4"of margin from the edges before your type or images begin to eliminate the risk of something being cut off — 1/8" is plenty on something small
PDFexported with crop marks and bleed switched on
01 — Start here
Three files. Three outcomes.
Here's the same flyer, submitted three different ways. Two of them go straight to press. One of them we have to send back. Find yours.
Ready to print
White border — nothing touches the edge
The design floats inside the page. Because no color, photo or shape runs off the side, there is nothing for a slightly-off cut to expose.
Document set to the finished size — 8½ × 11
No bleed needed
Crop marks optional at a stock sheet size
Nothing second-rate about it, either — plenty of beautiful printing has a white border. If your finished size isn't a stock sheet, add the marks or just tell us the size.
Ready to print
Color to the edge — with bleed and crop marks
The color keeps going past where we cut, so the blade always lands on ink. The corner ticks — placed by the export, never drawn by you — tell us exactly where the finished edge is.
PDF is 1/8" bigger than finished on all four sides
Crop marks added by the export
Finished size still 8½ × 11
This is what "print-ready" looks like when a design bleeds. It's one checkbox away in almost every app.
Send it back
Color to the edge — without bleed or crop marks
Same artwork, but the PDF is exactly 8½ × 11 and stops there. There is no margin for the blade, and no marks telling us where to cut.
Nothing printed past the finished size
No crop marks
A hair off-center leaves a white line
Fixing it costs you thirty seconds. Not fixing it costs us both a phone call, an email and a day. See how to add it.
Rule of thumb If any color, photo, box or shape touches the edge of your design, you need bleed. If everything stops short of the edge, you don't. That's the whole decision.
Nothing gets cut perfectly straight. Your job prints on an oversized sheet. Then a stack of those sheets — often five hundred at a time — is squared up and cut down together. The stack settles, the paper shifts a whisker, and the blade lands a fraction off where it should. Every printer on earth deals with this. Bleed is how we make it invisible.
02 — Where the marks go
Crop marks have to sit at your finished size
The marks are the only thing in the file that tells us how big the piece is meant to be. Your design app puts them at the corners of the document — so if the document isn't your finished size, the marks aren't either. The sheet they print on can be bigger, and always is once bleed and marks are added. What matters is that the marks land on the size you ordered.
Wrong
An 8½ × 11 document with a 6 × 4 postcard sitting in the middle of it. The export did its job and put the marks at the corners of the document — so they describe a sheet of paper, not your postcard.
Right
A 6 × 4 document with 1/8" of bleed around it. Same artwork, same spot on your screen — but the marks now sit on the postcard's corners, which is the only thing we need to know.
Your PDF will be bigger than your finished size, and that's correct. Export a 6 × 4 postcard with bleed and crop marks and the file opens at roughly 6½ × 4½. Nothing has gone wrong — the marks inside it still say 6 × 4, and that's what we cut to. A PDF that opens at exactly your finished size is the one to look twice at, because it has no room for either.
Where this goes wrong
Ordering 6 × 4 postcards and sending an 8½ × 11 page. The artwork is fine — the marks aren't. We can't tell whether you want the card trimmed out of the middle, or the whole sheet shrunk down to postcard size, and those two give very different results.
Ordering a 24 × 18 yard sign and sending a 1200 × 800 pixel image. Stretched to sign size that's about fifty pixels to the inch. It will print. It just won't look the way it does on your monitor.
Proportions that don't match. If the shape of your file isn't the shape of your finished piece, something has to give — we either crop into the design or leave a band of empty paper. That's your call to make, not ours to guess.
The fix is the same every time. Set the document to your finished size before you start designing, and let the export place the marks. If you've already finished, rebuild the page at the right size and paste the artwork in — it's quicker than it sounds, and quicker than a day of emails.
03 — The vocabulary
Three lines, three jobs
Print files have three boundaries. Tap each one to see what it does. (Drawn exaggerated — on a real flyer these lines sit a whisker apart.)
Bleed
So where do crop marks come in?
Crop marks are the little corner ticks your design app adds outside the bleed when you export. They tell our cutter exactly where your finished size begins. You never draw them yourself — you tick a box and the software places them perfectly.
04 — Your numbers
What size should the file be?
Pick what you're printing — or type your own size — and we'll do the arithmetic. Which number you use depends on your app, so we give you both.
×
If your app has a bleed setting Illustrator · InDesign · Canva · Publisher
8.5 × 11 in
Make the document this size, then set bleed to 0.125 in on all four sides and drag your background out to the bleed line.
If your app has no bleed setting Photoshop · Word · Google Slides
8.75 × 11.25 in
Build the canvas at this larger size at 300 ppi, run the background right to the canvas edge, and tell us the finished size so we know where to cut.
Keep all text and logos inside
8 × 10.5 in
Centered on the finished size — that's 1/4 in of clear space at every edge. Any closer and text starts to look crooked, or gets clipped.
05 — The clicks
How to add bleed and crop marks
Find your app. Every one of these ends with a PDF — that's the format we want.
Canva
Build your design at the finished size — an 8½ × 11 flyer is an 8.5 × 11 in Canva document.
Turn the guide on while you work: File → View settings → Show print bleed. A dotted line appears just inside the edge.
Drag every background color, photo and pattern past that dotted line to the very edge of the canvas. Pull text back so it sits comfortably inside.
Click Share → Download, and choose PDF Print for the file type.
Tick Crop marks and bleed.
On a Pro account, also set Color profile: CMYK. On a free account, leave it — we'll convert it.
Download, and send us that PDF.
Heads up: Canva's dotted bleed line sits inside the canvas edge, which trips people up. The canvas edge is the bleed; the dotted line is where we cut.
Adobe Illustrator
File → Document Setup. In the Bleed fields enter 0.125 in, click the chain icon so all four sides match, then OK.
A red line appears outside your artboard. Extend backgrounds and any image that touches an edge out to it.
File → Save As (or Export As) → Adobe PDF.
Preset: [Press Quality].
Open the Marks and Bleeds panel. Tick Trim Marks, change Offset to 0.125 in so the marks match your bleed, and tick Use Document Bleed Settings.
Save PDF.
Don't tick Registration Marks, Color Bars or Page Information — we add those ourselves, and they can crowd small pieces.
Adobe InDesign
File → Document Setup → Bleed and Slug. Set bleed to 0.125 in on all four sides. (New documents: click Bleed and Slug in the New Document dialog.)
Extend background frames past the page edge to the red bleed guide. Keep text inside the purple margin guide.
File → Export → format Adobe PDF (Print).
Preset: [Press Quality].
In Marks and Bleeds, tick Crop Marks, set Offset to 0.125 in to match your bleed, and tick Use Document Bleed Settings.
Export.
Multi-page booklets: export Pages, not Spreads. We impose the pages for you.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop has no bleed setting, so you build it into the canvas. Make a new file 0.25 in wider and 0.25 in taller than the finished size — that's 1/8 in of extra room on each side. Use the calculator above for your number.
Set 300 pixels/inch and color mode CMYK (RGB is fine if that's all you have — just expect a small color shift).
Add guides at 0.125 in from each edge — that's your cut line — and at 0.375 in for the safe area. (View → New Guide.)
Run your background all the way to the canvas edge. Keep text inside the inner guides.
File → Save As → Photoshop PDF, preset [Press Quality], and turn off "Downsample".
Tell us the finished size in your email — the PDF alone can't tell us where to cut.
Never draw your own crop marks inside the artwork. They'd print as part of the design.
Microsoft Publisher
Page Design → Size → Page Setup and set the finished size.
Drag backgrounds slightly past the page edge — Publisher lets objects hang off, and that overhang becomes your bleed.
File → Export → Save as PDF → Options… (or File → Save As, choose PDF, then Options).
Under "Specify how this publication will be printed", choose Commercial Press.
Click Print Options… and, under Printer's Marks, tick Crop marks. Under Bleeds, tick Allow bleeds and Print bleed marks if offered.
OK, then save the PDF.
Publisher's PDF export changes between versions. If the options above aren't there, just send us the .pub file and we'll set it up.
Word, Google Docs & Slides
Word, Google Docs and Google Slides can't produce real bleed or crop marks. You have three honest options:
Design away from the edge. Keep every background inside the page and leave a clean white border of at least 1/4 in. Nothing bleeds, nothing goes wrong — that's the first file at the top of this page.
Fake the bleed. Set the page size 0.25 in larger in each direction (Word: Layout → Size → More Paper Sizes; Google Slides: File → Page setup → Custom), set all margins to zero, run the background to the very edge, export a PDF, and tell us the finished size. We'll trim it.
Hand it to us. Send the file as-is. Our prepress desk sets up bleed and marks every day — for most jobs it takes a few minutes, and we'll tell you up front if there's any charge.
Whichever route you take, export a PDF — File → Save as PDF in Word, File → Download → PDF in Google. Never send a screenshot.
06 — The one that really hurts
Text too close to the edge
A missing bleed leaves a white hairline. Text crowding the trim gets clipped, and there's no living with that. Nobody sets out to put a phone number half off the card — it happens because the artwork looked fine on screen with a sixteenth of an inch to spare, and a sixteenth of an inch is exactly what the cutter takes.
Nicked The logo and the phone number were set a hair inside the edge. The cut landed a hair the other way — and now the dot has a flat side and the digits have flat bottoms. Small, but it is on all five hundred of them.Safe Same card, everything pulled inside the dashed safe area — 1/8" in from every trimmed edge, which is plenty on a piece this small. Now the cut can wander and nobody can tell.
How much clear space, and where
How much depends on the piece. A quarter inch on a flyer, poster or anything letter-sized. An eighth is plenty on a business card, label or ticket — a quarter inch would swallow an eighth of a 2-inch-tall card and leave you no room to design. Below an eighth on anything, you're gambling.
Every trimmed edge. Top, bottom, left and right — all four, not just the ones that look tight.
Both sides of a fold. The fold wanders just like the cut does. Give it the same clearance you give an edge.
Page numbers and small print. The stuff nobody proofreads is the stuff that gets clipped.
Thin borders are the worst offender. A 2 pt frame running around the outside magnifies every fraction the cut is off — one side ends up visibly fatter than the other. Make borders at least 1/4" thick, or leave them off entirely.
A few more things worth knowing
Resolution. An image that looks crisp on screen carries roughly a quarter of the detail a press needs, which is why screenshots and pictures pulled off a website often print softer than people expect. Vector art has no resolution problem at all. None of this stops us printing your file — it just helps to know before you see it.
Bright RGB colors shift. Neon greens, electric blues and vivid oranges live outside what CMYK ink can mix, so they print a shade duller. If an exact color matters, give us a Pantone number.
Send one flattened PDF. Not a folder of layers, not a linked Illustrator file with the images missing. Package or embed everything.
07 — Before you hit send
Sixty-second preflight
Run down this list. If all six are ticked, your file goes straight to press.
