Hi! Yeah. Commercial printer here. Please add bleed to the documents you want to print all the way to the edges. Printers can’t print to the edge, and so your prints need to be printed on a larger sheet and cut down. The amount of artwork i get from “professional” graphic designers that doesn’t have bleed is mind blowing
Though as the printing expert, shouldn’t formatting the content for the medium you’re putting it on be part of your domain instead of the artist’s?
Like if they want a final product that’s 70cm x 120cm with no margin but your printer needs a 5cm margin, shouldn’t you just center it on an 80cm x 130cm page (or whatever the smallest page is that has enough margin added) and cut it down to the 70cm x 120cm they wanted?
Is bleed in this context part of the design that goes past the edge so that part of it can be cut off, leaving no blank margin? Isn’t precision up to the point where such a page could be reliably cut right at the edge of the design to accomplish that without bleed? Like scanning cutters so that if the print is offset by 1mm, the cut can also be offset by the same to give consistent results?
Sorry if this comes off as accusatory, that wasn’t my intent, your comment made me curious.
When cutting through 100 sheets of paper, you aren’t going to get that sort of precision since the paper doesn’t want to cooperate with you. We have a small hydraulic guillotine in the basement of an old home that in theory cuts down to the thousandth of an inch, but in reality you aren’t going to get that. So a 1/8in (3mm for you metrics) bleed is added around the artwork to ensure that there are no white slivers at the edge of the final product. Couple that with a safety margin/live area assured edge to edge printing without affecting the important information on the final product. This doesn’t really matter when we do large posters, but it’s critical for small stuff like booklets, flyers, and business cards, which is 90% of what i print. But only a handful of the graphic designers i work with regularly actually understand that, so i have to spend hours every week fixing artwork for clients that are supposed to know better, but don’t no matter how much i beg them to include bleed.
We have a digital press, so there is always gonna be a little misalignment on the scale of hundreths of a millimeter, but lining up the paper in the cutter, i just get it as flush as i ca by hand before using a wodden block to get it tighter. Normal paper usually does a good job of staying put, but glossy coasted paper is slocker than hell and always jostles about. But even the large operations still use bleed because it’s way cheaper and easier to trim off the excess than try to fuck with that sort of precision. Like how in theory a grocery store could give you exactly one pound of ground beef, but the equipment and time needed to do that are so cost prohibited that they just give you an approximate amount and charge you accordingly.
From my experience with the machete paper cutters, no matter what you do the pages will shift under the pressure of the blade. I’m sure industrial cutters are far better, but it’s probably far cheaper to use lower precision with wiggle room than super high precision with a little less wiggle room.
I’ve used an industrial paper cutter before and it’s one of the most satisfying machines I’ve ever seen. Just imagine the sound of a blade slicing cleanly through several hundred sheets of paper. The thing had lasers and two buttons you had to press at once to operate it because it wouldn’t even care if your hand was in the way.
But everything was manually aligned by hand. Instead it could be a metal plate holding everything in place (maybe open on the scrap side to account for the width of the blade). I’d think that could give consistent results, but hard to say for sure how everything would move.
That plant also had die cutting machines that cut each page individually. I was just a temp worker there, so didn’t really get that far into the depth of the technology and what it could do. Most of the work I did there was pounding out the scrap parts from die-cut packages, which was also pretty satisfying, we’d use a rubber mallet to do a few hundred pages at once. Thinking back, I think that was one of my favourite jobs, especially because there were so few fucks to give.
Hi! Yeah. Commercial printer here. Please add bleed to the documents you want to print all the way to the edges. Printers can’t print to the edge, and so your prints need to be printed on a larger sheet and cut down. The amount of artwork i get from “professional” graphic designers that doesn’t have bleed is mind blowing
Though as the printing expert, shouldn’t formatting the content for the medium you’re putting it on be part of your domain instead of the artist’s?
Like if they want a final product that’s 70cm x 120cm with no margin but your printer needs a 5cm margin, shouldn’t you just center it on an 80cm x 130cm page (or whatever the smallest page is that has enough margin added) and cut it down to the 70cm x 120cm they wanted?
Is bleed in this context part of the design that goes past the edge so that part of it can be cut off, leaving no blank margin? Isn’t precision up to the point where such a page could be reliably cut right at the edge of the design to accomplish that without bleed? Like scanning cutters so that if the print is offset by 1mm, the cut can also be offset by the same to give consistent results?
Sorry if this comes off as accusatory, that wasn’t my intent, your comment made me curious.
When cutting through 100 sheets of paper, you aren’t going to get that sort of precision since the paper doesn’t want to cooperate with you. We have a small hydraulic guillotine in the basement of an old home that in theory cuts down to the thousandth of an inch, but in reality you aren’t going to get that. So a 1/8in (3mm for you metrics) bleed is added around the artwork to ensure that there are no white slivers at the edge of the final product. Couple that with a safety margin/live area assured edge to edge printing without affecting the important information on the final product. This doesn’t really matter when we do large posters, but it’s critical for small stuff like booklets, flyers, and business cards, which is 90% of what i print. But only a handful of the graphic designers i work with regularly actually understand that, so i have to spend hours every week fixing artwork for clients that are supposed to know better, but don’t no matter how much i beg them to include bleed.
That makes sense, thanks.
Where does the variation come in from page to page in one batch? Or is the variation in the cutting itself?
We have a digital press, so there is always gonna be a little misalignment on the scale of hundreths of a millimeter, but lining up the paper in the cutter, i just get it as flush as i ca by hand before using a wodden block to get it tighter. Normal paper usually does a good job of staying put, but glossy coasted paper is slocker than hell and always jostles about. But even the large operations still use bleed because it’s way cheaper and easier to trim off the excess than try to fuck with that sort of precision. Like how in theory a grocery store could give you exactly one pound of ground beef, but the equipment and time needed to do that are so cost prohibited that they just give you an approximate amount and charge you accordingly.
From my experience with the machete paper cutters, no matter what you do the pages will shift under the pressure of the blade. I’m sure industrial cutters are far better, but it’s probably far cheaper to use lower precision with wiggle room than super high precision with a little less wiggle room.
I’ve used an industrial paper cutter before and it’s one of the most satisfying machines I’ve ever seen. Just imagine the sound of a blade slicing cleanly through several hundred sheets of paper. The thing had lasers and two buttons you had to press at once to operate it because it wouldn’t even care if your hand was in the way.
But everything was manually aligned by hand. Instead it could be a metal plate holding everything in place (maybe open on the scrap side to account for the width of the blade). I’d think that could give consistent results, but hard to say for sure how everything would move.
That plant also had die cutting machines that cut each page individually. I was just a temp worker there, so didn’t really get that far into the depth of the technology and what it could do. Most of the work I did there was pounding out the scrap parts from die-cut packages, which was also pretty satisfying, we’d use a rubber mallet to do a few hundred pages at once. Thinking back, I think that was one of my favourite jobs, especially because there were so few fucks to give.