Fancy a trim?

Trimming is the process of cutting a document down to its finished size.

Commerical printing presses cannot print to the very edge of a sheet of paper so in order to achieve this effect, your design is usually printed onto a larger piece of paper. The excess unprinted border is trimmed off after printing using a guillotine. 


 If you are creating artwork for print, you will need to add an area of bleed to your design which is the part that's trimmed. If you're not sure what bleed is, take a look at our article 'What is Bleed?' for more information.

A guillotine operator at work

What is Bleed?

This is the most common area of artwork that is missed when supplying files.


So we'll take a quick look at what it is and why you need to add it to your artwork.


If you're creating a flyer for instance and you have a background colour that you want filling the complete flyer -  this colour needs to 'bleed' off the edge so when trimmed, there is no white space. 


Take a look at our small image above to see what we mean - this image applies to the majority of files you may supply.


For more information on artwork and relevant settings and tips - view our artwork page on our website here.