Designing Print Materials for Alphagraphics

Designing Print in the 21st Century

We here at Allegra Marketing/Print/Mail know from long experience how difficult designing a print product can be. We employ many specially trained designers to help facilitate this process here in house. This helps us to ensure quality, match colors, and achieve our customers design goals with the best product we can deliver.

We also know how expensive professional design can be, especially for new businesses or small non-profits who don't have the budgets to accommodate such services..

With the advent of free internet design software, like Canva, however, everyone has the tools at their fingertips to create great quality design's for little to no cost. This has been a god-send for our non-profit customers who no longer have to pay for expensive design software to create their appeals, mailings and posters.

This explosion of newly minted designer has created an interesting problem for our industry, however. While we have seen an uptick in the volume of great art being sent to us, some critical features of that art necessary to ensure high quality prints has been missing over the past few years, leading to costly redesigns and redo's.

Namely, Bleed.

What is Bleed?

In the printing world, bleed is a very important concept that deals with the edges of paper and how it is printed or cut.

Since printers feed paper by grabbing each sheet by the edge, no press or copier is capable of printing all the way to the outer edge of the material. If you place text, logos or images all the way to the edges of your template, then they will likely end up appearing slightly cut off or incomplete in the final product.

Understanding bleed helps prevent this problem by expanding the text or image outside of the designated final size, resulting in a polished and professional product.

How To Calculate the Final Document Size with Bleed

There are several ways to deal with bleed when it comes to printing. The first is to leave a white margin around the edges of the material you’re printing. This “safe zone” for printing text and images is a minimum of 0.25 inches inside the edge of the document negating the need for bleed.

If you want images or other graphics to extend all the way to the edge of the material, then the best way to do that is to extend your image past the cut line (“Crop Marks”) and into the “Bleed Zone”. A standard bleed area is generally .125 inches on each side. For example, if you’re preparing a standard 11 x 8.5 inch document for printing, you will want the final template to actually be 11.25 x 8.75 inches.

What's The Deal With Canva?

So what does all this mean for our intrepid Canva designer?

Not a great deal really. Just a little extra work to get your files to spec for submission on the AlphaGraphics Marketing/Print/Mail Digital store front.

Check out the link here for a video of detailed instructions on the design and bleed creation process.

Need a Little Help?

Cant quite get the files to work? Design not coming out the way you wanted? Feel free to fill out a Custom Estimate and our team of graphic designers can work their magic on any project, big or small.