What Is the Meaning of Bleed in Printing Merch Designs?

Bleed is an important concept when you're making a design to print on merch like stationery, business cards, and other paper products. It's a simple fact of how printing works, but mismanaging bleed – especially if you don't understand how it works – can leave shifted, unsightly designs that look unprofessional.

What Is and Isn't Bleed?

The term "bleed" is often used casually for colors of ink bleeding out of their normal borders or seeping through other colors. For example, if you have a multi-color process like screen printing and one color overlaps another when it shouldn't, some people call this bleed. It's not, though; that's actually just a misalignment of your templates.

A similar issue occurs when you're printing on top of a polyester fabric, and the underlying color bleeds through the pattern you're printing. This, however, also isn't actually bleed; it's dye sublimation. Color migration is a related issue.

Bleed is actually primarily relevant in printing paper products, especially ones that are cut down to size. Things like business cards, vinyl stickers, and stationery can all be subject to bleed.

What is Bleed Specifically?

Let's say you've used a tool like Canva to design a business card. It has the proper dimensions and looks good on the screen. You go to print it out and cut it down to size, only to find that your bright and vibrant background is marred by a white border around the outside of the card.

Or, maybe your design is sized just right. But, somewhere in the printing process, the alignment between the design and the cutting tool is shifted. Your cards look good, except for one edge, which has a line of white.

Both of these are examples of a lack of bleed. Some people think of it as the outside edge of the paper bleeding into the design, but it's actually kind of the opposite. Bleed is a good thing! Bleed is the margin of error you bake into your design so that even if it's cropped improperly, it at least still looks good.

For example, consider this image. Without the right amount of bleed, cutting the image to size results in a white border. With enough extra bleed, sure, a little bit of extra ink is used, but the design is guaranteed to reach all the way to the edge of the cut.

What are the Pros and Cons of Bleed?

Bleed is primarily a tool or technique, depending on how you define it, used as a margin of error in the trimming and cutting process.

The greatest benefit of using bleed is the elimination of unsightly background-colored borders around the edges of your design. It's often considered a more professional and more polished appearance for certain kinds of product. Using bleed is a common technique, but for a while it wasn't, and there were even printers that couldn't print all the way to the edge of their pages, so trimming properly was necessary.

On the other hand, bleed does slightly increase the expense of printing, because of the extra bit of paper and ink used. It's marginal at most, but it's worth considering if you're printing thousands of copies of any given item.

Printing without bleed requires more precision unless you design something that doesn't need bleed. You don't need bleed on a background that's the same color as the paper, for example, or when all of your image and text elements are well away from the borders of the item.

One of the greatest challenges of bleed comes when the image you need to bleed is not something as simple as a flat color or pattern. You can manage bleed in three different ways:

• Extending the background color. This is the most common kind of bleed, but it only works on items with a flat colored background, otherwise you end up with a clear delineation of the border.
• Extend the illustration. Sometimes, you can intentionally add more to the outer edges of an image for a bleed that, while it might not be up to the same level of quality as the original, can be a more blended end result.
• Expand the base image. If you make the base image slightly larger with the intention of allowing the outer edge to be slightly cropped, you don't have any of these problems unless there are important elements at the edges of the image.

Picking the right way to implement bleed depends on the element you're extending.

Issues Bleed Does and Doesn't Solve

Bleed primarily solves the problem of a design that doesn't fully reach the edges of the size of the paper you're printing on. It's especially prominent for things like printing photographs, printing out business cards, or printing stationery with a full-page background.

The two biggest issues bleed solves are scale issues and flood issues.

Scale issues happen when the concept of scale is different between design software and printer. This is a lot less common than it used to be, but there was often a disconnect between pixel/inch sizing between different resolutions of images, and images would need to be "formatted for print" to make sure they matched the scale of the printer. These days, things are more standardized, and this is less of an issue. It's also minimized through the use of vector drawings rather than pixel-based images, but it can still come up from time to time.

Flood issues are what we've primarily described already; the background, which should flood the whole of the print surface, is cut off at the edges. Having enough bleed eliminates this problem.

You can also use bleed with designs that need to go to the edge of a page but aren't fully extended to all of the borders. For example, a page of a flyer or brochure might have an image aligned to one edge but otherwise positioned in the middle of the page. Bleed prevents a hairline of the paper-colored border to its outer edge. With an image like this, you need to align the image to the bleed edge rather than the page/trim edge. The downside is that it cuts some of the image off, so ideally, your image won't have any critical details at its edge.

What bleed doesn't solve is alignment problems. This is especially true if you have an intentional border around the edge of a design. If the cut is off from the center, the difference in edges at the border will be visible to the naked eye, no matter how much bleed you have. Bleed does help with alignment if there's no obvious edge comparison point, though. No one will notice if the text on a business card is shifted a millimeter to the right, but if the border is shifted, it looks sloppy.

Full Bleed vs No Bleed Printing

The use of bleed in printing is often divided into full bleed or no bleed printing.

Full bleed printing is used when the design needs to go all the way to the edge of a page. A coffee table book with gorgeous full-page images, the cover of a magazine, or the image on a calendar are all common examples of full-bleed printing.

No bleed, meanwhile, means that the image stops, and there's an intentional border around it. This can be useful if you want to print to an exact size and plan to hand-cut or when you want an intentional gap between the design and background. It is reminiscent of matting a piece of art to mount in a frame. It can also be an intentional element of a design.

You can also choose no bleed printing when your background is already going to be white or a specific color. For example, if you want a flat yellow background across your image, you can use full-bleed yellow printing, or you can simply print on yellow paper with no bleed to avoid wasting ink.

Is Bleed Used in T-Shirts and Other Merch?

Generally, the answer is no. Bleed isn't a useful concept in merchandise printing for things like shirts, totes, mugs, and other items.

The biggest reason for this is the purpose of bleed. Bleed exists to help minimize unsightly misalignment of borders and blank space along the edges of a design. For something like a tote, a t-shirt, or a mug, there's no defined edge, and no cropping being done. You don't need to add bleed to your design, because you're not then going to cut out the design. A shirt doesn't stay a shirt if you cut out the front or the back, right?

Bleed is instead used primarily on stationery but also on items that are cut out in other ways. Stickers are a common use; printing a sticker with bleed allows you to have a full-color sticker with a logo for a label, for example.

How Much Bleed Do You Need?

If you're setting up a design, how much bleed do you need to work into that design?

Recommendations here can vary depending on the software and the equipment you're using. Most people recommend that if you're printing something the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, you include about 0.125" of bleed around the outer edges. Others recommend somewhere in the 3mm to 5mm range.

Unfortunately, there's not always a clear answer. Including a large bleed zone around a small design can mean you don't get to pack as many copies of the design in the same space, wasting paper. Including too much bleed can also make less sense than simply using colored paper.

On the other hand, if your bleed zone is too small, you reduce your margin for error. A good printing process and a good cutting system can prevent that margin from being necessary at all, but mistakes can always happen. Unfortunately, it only takes a tenth of a millimeter to be noticeable to the eye if there's sufficient reference to the edges.

How to Configure Bleed

Getting the bleed right for your design is a matter of knowing the purpose of the design, where the design is going to be printed, and what your goals are with the design. You may be able to get away with little or no bleed, or you might not need to concern yourself with bleed at all. On the other hand, bleed might be essential to get your finished product looking exactly the way you want it to.

There are a lot of different ways to configure bleed, and it depends on the system you're using. The instructions vary between, say, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign, not to mention working with other company programs.

Calculating how much bleed you want is easy, at least, because the amount of bleed to add in is always going to be roughly the same amount. Since the act of cutting is a physical process, and it doesn't matter whether your item is a quarter-inch circle logo sticker or a poster-sized calendar page, your margin for error is roughly the same regardless. The only exception is for very large items, like banners, where even more bleed may be necessary to ensure proper sizing of the finished product.

A lot of it also comes down to the precision and consistency of your printing and cutting equipment. Bleed is most useful in cases where your cutting is automated; if you're hand-cutting, you can frequently cut precisely where you want and don't need to manage bleed.

The best way to manage bleed is to have a professional designer on your side. For example, if you want to get stationery printed for your business using our services, you can also hire us to work with you for your design. Design services even come free with large enough orders!

As we mentioned above, bleed isn't required or used for many different kinds of printing. You're not going to incorporate bleed in a design that you print on a t-shirt because you don't need a margin of error for trimming. In fact, adding bleed to a design you print on something more permanent means that the bleed margin is itself part of the permanent design. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course; it just depends on what you're going for.

When it comes right down to it, bleed is a tool. It's not the same as ink bleed-through, like you might get with printing on fabrics, or color migration, which you get with certain kinds of printing on certain kinds of fabrics. That's a topic for another day.