Printing crops and bleed explained

How to correctly setup artwork for print

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Introduction

Crops and bleed are terms used by print firms to show where printed material is to be cut down to. Most publishing programmes such as Adobe InDesign allow crops and bleed to be added to a document in order to correctly supply artwork ready for print. We explain what these are below.

What are crops?

In simple terms, 'crops' or 'crop marks' are small lines placed in the corner of each printed document to indicate where it should be cut. Printing firms rarely print to standard A4 or A3 size sheets because it's not possible to print to the very edge of a sheet of paper. The paper used is slightly larger than needed in order to allow for printing past the crop marks. This is where bleed marks come in useful.

What is bleed?

The term 'bleed' is used for all objects overlapping the border of your document. Let's say you're working on a brochure with images against the sides of your pages. Setting bleed supplies the printer with a document slightly larger then the final document will be. The industry standard is 3mm. Bleed allows the cropping process room for error. Paper itself can slightly expand / contract or the cutting machine may be a fraction out of position. If your images finish exactly at the page edge, when cropped you may be left with a small white border.

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