What Is Bleed & What Size Should It Be?

Bleed refers to the extra 3mm area added around the edges of your artwork to ensure that colours, images, or background elements extend seamlessly to the edge of the page after trimming. Without bleed, slight variations in cutting could result in unwanted white borders.

Does My Artwork Require Bleed?

Yes. To achieve a professional, edge-to-edge finish, all artwork submitted for printing should include 3mm bleed.

We provide templates for each product, available in Illustrator, InDesign, and PDF formats on our product pages.

How to Add Bleed to Your Artwork

If your design contains images, colour blocks, or text that touch the edge of the page, you must extend them 3mm beyond the final trim size. You can do this in two ways:

• Manually extend the design elements 3mm beyond the edge.
• Use your design software's bleed settings to automatically add bleed when exporting your PDF.

When creating a print-ready PDF, ensure the document size includes the extra 3mm bleed to avoid cropping issues.

What Happens If My Artwork Doesn’t Have Bleed?

For Just Print jobs, if your artwork is submitted without bleed, we will automatically enlarge the file to compensate. However, this may cause slight cropping, particularly if text or important elements are positioned too close to the edge.

Please note that for Just Print, we do not manually check for content positioned too close to the trim edge, so always ensure key elements are placed with a safe margin inside the trim area.

Find out how to set up bleed in your artwork here.