Many of our ads are PDFs sent by clients or agencies.
Before, I was a little intimidated.īut, for practical reasons, InDesign is the best way for us to go. It functions perfectly well for what we do, but now that I’ve been able to take the time to learn more about Illustrator’s tools and capabilities, I really like it. But I moved here from the newsroom, where InDesign rules for pagination, and that’s what I knew. Really, I think now, after being in the creative services department for almost two years, I’d prefer to use Illustrator to create the majority of our ads - and once in awhile, when I get the chance to be creative and design something from scratch, I do. I did this for Thanksgiving in Illustrator. With that said many projects, printing websites, or clients might provide templates with set bleed areas.Īs long as a solid understanding of what a bleed is can be maintained, these templates will be easy to work with.My two co-workers and I were asked to each do a holiday house ad last year. The suggestions above are a good foundation for handling bleeds. Similar to Illustrator, InDesign provides red guidelines for the bleed area. Here a 1 inch bleed should be plenty, but again it doesn’t hurt to call the printer. The max bleed in InDesign is 6 inches, far larger than the margin of error on any modern print equipment. Lastly custom crop marks have been placed along the guides. Guide (trim) lines have been placed at a 1″ margin, thus providing the 4″圆″ trim line with a 1″ bleed area.
In the example above, a 4″圆″ image is intended to be printed and trimmed out of a 5″x7″ sheet. In the event that bleeds need to be accounted for in Photoshop – say, for a job you are printing yourself – simple math can be done to account. With that said, the Adobe workflow often needs to be manipulated in ways it wasn’t meant to. Therefore in a “best practice” work flow, bleed would be ignored in Photoshop and later addressed in InDesign when assembling the job. Photoshop generally isn’t intended to handle print related parameters such as bleed so much as it is intended to process photo elements of print jobs in a program such as InDesign. The maximum bleed is 1 inch – a large margin of error for the trim on modern printing equipment, but again, it doesn’t hurt from the digital designer’s standpoint. In the “New Document” prompt there is an option to set the bleed guideline. In this guide, a 1 inch bleed is used and can be considered very safe practice. With that said, it never hurts to ask a client for their printers contact info. Even in cases where the printer will tile the job for printing on a much larger sheet, they will have the ability to decrease the amount of bleed if need be. How much bleed to leaveįor a digital designer there is no such thing as too much bleed. This bleed is important as it allows flexibility in production environments where the trim is not in the exact same spot for each sheet. In the simple example above notice how the circle design element “bleeds” off the edge of what will be the final printed sheet (after trimming). Once the stock sheet is printed on, the trim line is cut and the bleed is removed.
DefinitionĪ bleed is essentially the visual content that runs over the trim edge, or the intended cut line on the printed stock sheet. This article clears the fog and shows the proper way to address bleeds in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. With that said, in the event a designer ignores the impending implications of a bleed in the design process, the printer can have difficulty in successfully manufacturing the job. “Bleed” is a part of the printers vocabulary – a word that digital designers are familiar with, but often never have to confront face to face the same way a press operator does.