What is 3mm bleed?

A small mystery to some but very simple once explained. A business card measures 85mm x 55mm but when printing on a professional press it’s 3mm bigger all round, 91mm x 61mm.

This allows 3mm to be trimmed all round after printing, giving a smooth edge and allowing pictures and colours to BLEED of the edge.

5mm minimum Safe zone

Leave 5mm in-between text and the edge of the paper. It’s tempting to fill your page with text but leaving 5mm is an important design rule for business cards and small flyers. Larger documents should have larger safe zones.

Trimming also has a tolerance of 1mm – 2mm, so having your text 5mm from the edge hides any movement.

Artwork Guidelines
Artwork Guidelines

Pressola PDF workflow

Design your projects using any software products, including Adobe, Corel and Microsoft software but please save to PDF, this is the document we need to make everything work. PDF is short for portable document format, if you save the PDF in the correct way it leaves very little room for error. Please read on for the correct way!

Resolution: 300 dpi minimum Format: PDF Colour: CMYK (RGB/Pantones will be converted during proofing)
Fonts: Outlined or Embedded Bleed: 3 mm Safe Zone: 5mm  No printer marks