Crops and bleed

Professional printers often work with larger paper sizes than the final product. This is because most printing machines can’t print right to the edge of the sheet. If your design includes content that goes all the way to the edge, some of it may be unintentionally cut off during trimming. To ensure this doesn't happen, you should add crop marks and bleed to your document.

Crop marks

Crop marks are trim marks. The lines indicate where the paper will be trimmed to its final size.

Bleed

This is the area beyond the crop marks where your design extends. It provides a margin of safety, helping prevent unwanted white edges due to slight variations in cutting. We recommend adding 3 mm of bleed around all edges of your design.

Safe zone

To make sure important elements like text or logos don’t get accidentally cut off, we recommend keeping them at least 5 mm away from the edge of the page. This area is called the safe zone. It ensures everything you want to keep visible stays within the final trimmed size. View our Crops and Bleed explaination (PDF, 127kB) to learn more.

Submitting your file for print

When sending your file to print, ensure that the PDF has crop marks and bleed added.