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BLEED & QUIET BORDERS Understanding the need for Bleed and Quiet Borders is vital to achieve the desired result. BLEED This is where your printed image(s) or background goes right to the edge of the page. We require Bleed to allow for the tolerance of our guillotine (the machine used for cutting 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 these 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. QUIET BORDERS A Quiet Border is the distance you should allow from the edge of your finished page size for text, diagrams or images that are not intended to bleed. The reason for the border is again the tolerance in cutting. If you have a design where the text runs close to, or right to the 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 programs, such as InDesign, Illustrator, Corel Draw, Microsoft Publisher or Affinity Publisher (previously called Serif PagePlus) 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 programs, such as with Microsoft Word, bleeding beyond the boundaries of the page is not possible. However it is still possible to create a page with bleed using these programs. This is achieved by setting up pages which are 6mm bigger than the required sheet size in each dimension. For example, for a required finished size of A4 (210mm x 297mm) you need to 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). |
Images
Images need to be a minimum resolution of 300dpi and should ideally be final size in CMYK and saved as a TIFF. Images copied from the internet are NOT of sufficient quality for colour printing, as they are normally low resolution (150dpi or less) and in RGB format. Black & White images also need to be a minimum resolution of 300dpi and should ideally be final size and saved as a 'greyscale' TIFF. If you are unable to save images as TIFF files then you can save them as JPEG files.
Images and text in Microsoft Word.
As Word only works in RGB we can convert your file(s) to CMYK but be aware that the colour of images and text may change due to limitations in the conversion process and may not look the same as those on your computer screen or inkjet/laser printout.