At Victron Printing, we are pleased to offer borderless “full bleed” printing. This means that we can print to the edge of the paper. We accomplish this by either utilizing the borderless printing feature on our printers, or by adding crop marks and manually cutting the paper to custom sizes.
However, even with the best printers and precision paper-cutting machines, and hundreds of hours of experience cutting prints, perfection is elusive. Due to regular variances in the printing and cutting process, it’s standard practice to add a little extra wiggle room to ensure that prints come out looking their best. In fact, the printing industry has specific terminology to explain the extra space we give prints to make sure minuscule variances in things like paper loading and cutting don’t negatively impact the look of your artwork. Here are the are the terms you’ll want to know, and what they mean:
- Trim line: This is the outside edges of the paper you receive your print on.
- Bleed: An extra margin beyond the trim which is expected to get cut off. The requested .125 inch bleed means that 1/16 of an inch on each side of the print will be trimmed. Without that safeguard, if we were even 1/100th of an inch off when cutting, you could see blank paper along the edge of your print.
- Safe area: The area which you can be certain will not be cut off during printing or trimming. Without a safe area, important things like your artist signature could be cut off, if they were too close to the trim line.
When we initiate borderless printing, the printer will actually print outside of the paper margins and excess ink is absorbed by printing pads. When we set up files to be manually cut, we use crop marks (see example setup file). This gives the best illustration of the need for bleed and safe areas.