You see posters, flyers, brochures, business cards…whatever…printed with photos and color all the way to the edge of paper. You try to accomplish the same effect on your inkjet printer at home and it always ends in disappointment. How do they do that?
In the printing (and graphic design) world, it’s called a “bleed.” The graphics, photos, or color blocks are set up in such a way that they extend off the edge of the printed page. It tends to have a higher quality, more professional appearance than having a white border around the edge of a printed piece…because that can literally be done on any home printer.
It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
The first thing you have to understand about making a printed piece bleed is that you have to start with paper that is larger than what you want to end up with. Take a typical letter-sized page, for instance: 8.5 x 11. If you want a flyer or brochure of that size to bleed, you need to print it on a larger page size: 9 x 11.5 or something close to that.
A high quality page layout application (like InDesign) or graphics program (like Illustrator) will allow for you to set the actual page size to what you want, then overlap the edges of the page to achieve the bleed. InDesign actually asks what size bleed you want when you set up a new document. For printing of this size, I never choose anything more than 1/8 of an inch: .125”.
If you don’t have access to a print-quality page layout program, then the first thing I’ll suggest is to consider hiring a graphic designer with printing experience as they will be most likely to know what settings to use and how to set the file up so you’ll have the least amount of kickback from the print shop you send the file to.
Let It Bleed
“But I already set my file up in Microsoft Word and I don’t want to have it re-done in InDesign,” you say. I may silently (or not so silently) judge you for this decision, but really, all is not lost. Word actually will allow you to set up custom page sizes for your documents (Page Setup on my Mac version)…choose a 9 x 11.5 page size, although it may give you no end to error messages as it tries to warn you that whatever printer you have selected won’t be able to accommodate that size.
The next thing is to make sure you don’t violate “safe areas” with text. In a page layout program margin lines and ruler guides can be fairly easy to see and manipulate…not so much in Word, unfortunately. The margins settings is hidden under a second layer of settings (under Page Setup…then under “Microsoft Word” and “Margins.”
Because printing is sometimes an inexact process, we always recommend keeping text, logos, and other important things (like faces in a photos) at least .125” away from the edge of a page. Therefore, if you have a 9 x 11.5 page size, you first need to know that .25” margin is necessary just to bring the final size down to 8.5 x 11…then add .125 onto each side of that, making the margin .375”.
But the reality is that .125” is only an appropriate margin for business cards and some post cards. Generally .25” is better for brochures and flyers. In which case, use a total margin of .5”, which should keep your text and important graphic elements a quarter inch from the edge of the page.
Bleeding Love
The next step is to export that Word doc as a PDF from your computer. This is actually rather important as Word does not tend to allow printer settings or fonts to travel with a doc file. There are probably a dozen or more versions of Word in common usage, spread across a dozen or more operating systems (Mac and Windows), all of which run different printers and have different drivers installed. In practice this means that if you design something in Word and send it to another computer…it will PROBABLY look different in some way on that other computer.
The only way to ensure everything looks as you intended is to export a PDF from your computer, then look at that PDF and make sure it looks like you intended before emailing it to your print provider.
You should never expect your print provider to improve a file you sent them. Do your best to make it top quality BEFORE you send it. If you have any doubts or questions, you can send the original file—Word in this case—as well as the PDF you output from it.
Do you have questions about whether your file will work or not? Give us a call at 423-661-8031.