Understanding Bleed & Safety Line

Intro to Bleed

Understanding the purpose of the bleed can be a confusing topic for a lot of people. The main thing to remember is that we build everything with bleed and anything you drag near the edge of the canvas automatically gets pulled out to the bleed, so your designs are ready to be professionally printed.

The switch to hide/show bleed is located by clicking on the settings gear on the right side of the editor.

What is the bleed?

Bleed is a printing term that refers to design elements that go beyond the edge of the canvas before trimming. In other words, the bleed is the area to be trimmed off.

The bleed area gives the printer a small amount of space to account for the movement of the paper when they cut it.

Having a bleed also allows artwork and background colors to extend all the way to the edge of the printed item (i.e. Business cards that have a blue background from edge to edge). 

Why do printers require a bleed?

It is very difficult to print exactly to the edge of a sheet of paper/card so, to achieve this, it is necessary to print a slightly larger area than is needed and then trim the paper/card down to the required finished size. Images and shapes which are intended to extend to the edge of the page must be extended beyond the trim line to give a bleed.

In the image below, everything outside of the white line is the bleed area and will be cut off when taken to the printer. The line appears because we turned on show bleed.

Safety Line Intro

The safety line is a necessary rule and one you should try to understand because it's actually saving you from some potential issues down the road.

What is the safety line?

The safety line is an invisible line (shown below with a red dotted line). This invisible line prevents text and icons from getting cut off if your project went to print.