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.