PrintCraft
Print-ready explained: bleed, trim, 300 dpi, and how to get them out of Voidcanvas
What a printer means by trim, bleed, safe area and 300 dpi, and the honest routes to a print file from Voidcanvas today: Studio delivery with bleed and crop marks, or the Editor PDF with bleed you add yourself.
Screen work forgives a lot. Print does not: paper is cut with a small margin of error, ink behaves differently from light, and a mistake costs a reprint. 'Print-ready' is a handful of specific requirements. This post explains each one, then shows exactly what Voidcanvas does and does not do for you, because the two export routes behave differently and it matters which you use.
Trim, bleed and safe area
Printers print on larger sheets and cut them down. The guillotine can drift by a millimetre or so, so artwork needs three zones.
| Zone | What it is | Typical size |
|---|---|---|
| Trim | The finished size, where the cut should go. | A5 is 148 × 210 mm. |
| Bleed | Artwork past the trim that gets cut away. Anything touching the edge must continue into it. | 3 mm each side in the UK and Europe. US printers often ask for 1/8 in. |
| Safe area | An inner margin for text, logos and anything important. | At least 3 to 5 mm inside the trim. |
Without bleed, a slight drift leaves a hairline of white paper along the edge. Without a safe area, the same drift can cut through a phone number. Crop marks are short lines outside the bleed that show where to cut.
What 300 dpi actually means
Only pixels are real. The dpi number stored in a file is a note about how big to print it. The formula is print size in inches = pixels ÷ ppi. Anything read at arm's length (flyers, cards, brochures) wants 300 ppi at its final size, which is why the A4 flyer preset is 2480 × 3508 pixels: exactly 210 × 297 mm at 300. Posters seen from a metre or two can drop to 150, and billboards far lower. At 300 ppi, 3 mm of bleed is about 36 pixels (3.05 mm). Image resolution explained has the maths.
Colour: RGB in, CMYK on paper
Screens mix light; presses lay down cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. Very bright RGB blues, greens, pinks and oranges have no ink equivalent and come out duller. Voidcanvas works in sRGB and every export is RGB: there is no CMYK export, no ICC profile handling and no spot colour. Studio's print PDFs say so on their slug line. The right person to convert is your printer, with the profile for their press and paper, and the right safeguard is a proof.
Route 1: Studio delivery, with bleed and crop marks
This is the fullest print output Voidcanvas makes, and the one I would use for any job going to a printer. Studio's print formats know their size in millimetres: A4 flyer, A5 flyer, A3 poster, Poster 18 × 24 in, Business card and Roll-up banner. On the Deliver tab, tick Print PDF and press Build the package. Each print PDF has:
- The artwork at its trim size in mm.
- 3 mm bleed on every side, and crop marks outside it.
- TrimBox and BleedBox set, so the printer's software finds the cut line on its own.
- A slug line naming the client, job, format, version, trim size and bleed, and noting that the colour is RGB.
Outdoor formats such as billboards have no fixed size in mm, so their PDF takes its size from the pixels at 300 dpi. Confirm the real size with the sign maker. Deliver every format covers the package.
Route 2: the Editor PDF, with bleed you add
Export as… (Ctrl+E, Cmd+E on a Mac) with PDF makes a one-page, image-based PDF: your design as a single high-quality JPEG, flattened onto white. It adds no bleed and no crop marks. The page size comes from the pixel size alone. Over 2000 pixels on the longest side, the Editor treats it as print at 300 dpi. At 2000 or under, it uses 96 dpi, a screen size.
That rule works for the A4 flyer, A5 flyer and 18 × 24 in poster presets. It does not work for the Business card preset: 1050 × 600 pixels is 3.5 × 2 inches at 300 dpi, but it is under 2000, so the PDF page comes out far too big. For cards, use Studio delivery, or send a PNG and tell the printer the size.
To add bleed in the Editor, start from a print preset and before you design:
- Choose Image, Canvas size…, tick Relative, and add 72 to the width and 72 to the height with the anchor in the centre. That is 36 pixels, about 3 mm, on each side.
- Run backgrounds and photos out to the new edge.
- Add guides 36 pixels in from each edge with View, Guides, New guide… to mark the trim, and keep text well inside them.
- Export as PDF at 1×, and tell the printer: RGB, 300 dpi, 3 mm bleed included, no crop marks.
Text in this PDF is rendered to pixels at 300 dpi rather than kept as type. At normal sizes it prints well; very small text is where you would notice. Export for print has the full detail.
Route 3: brand guideline print PDF
The brand guideline builder in Studio has its own Print PDF: multi-page, 300 dpi, 3 mm bleed and crop marks, on A4 portrait or 297 × 167 mm for the deck layout. See Brand guideline exports.
Four questions for your printer
- Do you accept an RGB PDF and convert it to CMYK with your profile?
- How much bleed do you want, and do you need crop marks?
- Is an image-based PDF at 300 dpi fine for this job?
- Can I see a proof before the full run?
Then print a copy at 100 per cent on an office printer. The colour will be wrong, but the size will not, and it is the quickest way to find text sitting too close to the trim. Designing for print covers paper, proofs and the rest.
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