What are Bleed and Safe Area?
Bleed Area:
This is the area where you should extend your artwork to, and will be the “Excess Part” which the card stock will be trimmed off to the actual size. Due to trimming tolerances, it is important to extend your artwork to the bleed area so that there will no unprinted portion (white spaces) of your final product. Different products’ artwork requires different bleed amount, as such you may like to download our respective templates to find out.
Actual Area:
Also known as Trimming Line – This will be the portion where our trimming machine will trim the card stock to the actual size. Most trimming machines will have tolerances of +/- 2mm.
Safe Area:
As the same suggests, the safe area is to ensure that your important texts, logo and images are safely placed within the cutting boundary. Anything that is placed outside of the safe area is “unsafe” and due to trimming tolerances, they might be cut off during the trimming process.
Ensuring sufficient Dots per Inch (DPI)
An acceptable DPI to be used should be within 150 – 300 DPI, otherwise the printed images might risk being pixelated or blurry.
Care should also be taken when images downloaded off the web are used for the design, as not all images which look nice and sharp on your monitor will be similarly good on your final print product. The images should be viewed on your monitor at 100% scale for a more accurate gauge of the pixelation and acceptablity.
Creating a Spot UV Artwork
Spot UV is a special kind of varnish finishing that are targeted on specific area on the artwork for a more premium outlook. Spot UV effect will cause the targeted area to be glossy and reflective, and in addition, the slight protrusion will gave users a 3D effect feel.
In order to create a Spot UV artwork, designers will need to fill up the entire area to be Spot UV with the CMYK setting as : C=0, M=0, Y=0 and K=100. Whereas the targeted area needs to be duplicated onto the Spot UV template in the Exact Spot.
Artwork Orientation
Using the above image as an example. If intention is to create a Portrait Business Card which will look in the same orientation when users turn over the card from Left to Right. Then the front and back artworks in the template should be layout such that they share the same corners/edges.