Crop Marks & Bleeds

The Crop Marks in your file and on our templates represent where your job will trim. Our pricing includes full bleeds for all print products.

Bleeds are critical in printing because high volume cutters are imprecise. Cutting blades need to be thick to penetrate large quantities of paper, so a trim tolerance of 1/32" to 1/16" is considered normal and acceptable.

If your file has color to the edge, you must have a 1/8" bleed extending beyond the crop marks to accommodate this trim tolerance. Otherwise, a white edge can appear on the final job.

If you have a thin white or colored border within the final cropping area, we recommend that it be at least 1/4" wide; a thinner border can appear asymmetrical after cropping, also because of trim tolerance.

On our templates, we include a "safe" area. This is an area inside the crops where type should not appear, since type should not be too close to the trim area.

crop detail

To download templates for your particular layout application, please see our Templates Page.