FAQs – What Are Crops and Bleed

The words ‘crops and bleed’ are some of the most frequently used terms in printing. But what are they?Basically commercial print machinery can not print right to the edge of a sheet (unlike some home photo printers) so in order to achieve full coverage printing, we have to print the page on a slightly larger sheet and then trim down to the desired size.

In a nut shell, crop marks are simply a guide for the print finisher as to where to trim the sheet and the bleed area is 3mm ‘extra’ of the image or colour that extends beyond the page boundary -applied to the document when it is designed. When the page is trimmed to the crop marks, the extra 3mm bleed area is trimmed off and sent for recycling… and voila, glorious full page coverage.

At Typecraft we completely understand that the shear amount of terminology used in the industry can be baffling at best, so if you require any specific clarification on specific terms, please feel free to call us on 01242 518191 and we happily talk you through it.