Sure it sounds kinda easy, but when we design for print it’s important to keep some basic rules in mind. If you never did any print designs read on to find out what to do, to avoid instant failure. The most important thing is – modern printers are pretty precise, but still not as precise as your screen. That means that if you make an A4 sized paper and print it on a bigger one, the cutting and printing process together can result in your design being actually less than a4. And most clients don’t really want that.
So what we do is we set up the bleed. This means we make the image actually larger than what we want to achieve. A typical bleed in europe (and most of the world) is somewhere around 3mm. Sometimes there are 5mm bleeds, but that’s a rare thing so let’s focus on the first one. Below you can see a handy table of various print formats and the sizes the document should have if we take bleed into account. You should definitely start with that – create the document in that larger size and add guides at the 3mm mark (that’d make 4 guides for a document). When you have that you can start designing!
| A Format default | A Format with bleed | B format default | B Format with bleed |
| A0 – 841×1189mm | A0 – 847×1195mm | B0 – 1000×1414mm | B0 – 1006×1420mm |
| A1 – 594×841mm | A1 – 600×847mm | B1 – 707×1000mm | B1 – 713×1006mm |
| A2 – 420×594mm | A2 – 426×600mm | B2 – 500×707mm | B2 – 506×713mm |
| A3 – 297×420mm | A3 – 303×426mm | B3 – 353×500mm | B3 – 359×506mm |
| A4 – 210×297mm | A4 – 216×303mm | B4 – 250×353mm | B4 – 256×359mm |
| A5 – 148×210mm | A5 – 154×216mm | B5 – 176×250mm | B5 – 182×256mm |
Once we have that covered there’s one important thing to add to this. When you consider bleed, remember this is NOT a margin. That means that if you put something too close to the bleed line, it’ll look like it’s cut wrong, or “falling off the page” kinda thing. Unless of course it’s intentional (like those windows phone systems cutting words in half). You can see what NOT to do in the example above.
Below is the same image with added margins. The margins can be actually anything you feel like. If you like symmetry make them 6mm and it’ll all be mathematical and stuff. But it seriously can be anything above 5mm. 10mm looks pretty good on most A4 prints too. Enjoy!
