Friday, June 30, 2006, 02:48 PM - Page Layout
Designing a job for print that will cut correctly at the cutter is very important because an excellent design piece that's cut wrong will be rejected by the customer. The most important part of designing is knowing the final cut size of the job and determining whether there's bleeds on the page or not. Bleeds are extra space of art work that extends off the edge of the trim area of a page. We recommend that our customers give us 1/8 inch of extra bleeds on jobs that have art work extending off the edge of the trim area. The graphics above are a good example of a business card with bleeds included by the designer (top left) and the same business card not having any bleeds (top right).
For the sake of this demonstration, let's use the business card on the top left of this page as reference. The top left busines card is a good example of a job submitted with bleeds. The standard size of a business card is 2 by 3 and a half (2x3.5). Let's do a quick tutorial on creating bleeds by using the top left business card as an example.
STEP 1: Make the page size of your file 2 inches high and 3.5 wide. The orientation of your page should be horizontal because this card is a horizontal card.
STEP 2: Draw a square box that has 1/8 of extra space on all 4 sides and center the square so that the center point of the square and the center of your page are at the same location. The size of your square should be larger than your page size ( your square size should be 2.25" X 3.75" ).
STEP 3: Once your square is centered correctly with your page size, the size of the square is your bleed size. The card in this case will be cut 1/8 inch smaller on all sides and the final cut size will be 2 by 3 and a half inches.
The background image of the business card above was created in Adobe Photoshop and the height and width of the image is: 2.25 X 3.75.
STEP 4: If the width and heigth of your image with bleeds is the same size as the square you drew, you should be able to center it with the square you've created and they both should line up correctly.
In the example above, I used Adobe Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. What I did was I drew a box that was 2.25 by 3.75 in Adobe Indesign and centered it with my page size ( 2 by 3.5 ). I imported the backgound graphic with crop marks and type into the box I created in Indesign. I then selected the graphic inside of the box I drew, press and held the command and shift key on my keyboard and then press the letter "e" to center the graphic automatically inside of the box I drew. I've already type set the text and created the cropmarks with the background graphic in Adobe Illustrator and saved the file as an EPS. The crop marks you see on the the top left example about were created in Illustrator by making a box 2 by 3.5 inches, centering the center point of the box with the back ground graphic and converting the box into crop marks using Illustrators crop mark filter. Keep in mind that I turned off the fill and strokes for the 2 by 3.5 inch box before I converted it into crop marks.
We recomend crop marks to be created automatically and not manually. The are options in most layout programs to automatically creat crop marks. The amount of inches the crop marks should offset from the bleed should be larger than 1/8 (.125) inches. We use .125.
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