Bleeds, or printing images and color right up to the edge of the page, are one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to enhance the professional appearance of your print job. Having your graphics bleed delivers a more visually rich appearance, while typically not resulting in a significant increase the price. This is why most major publications and professional marketing collateral include bleeds as part of their design.
So why doesn't everyone use them?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation surrounding the process. Everyone has their own workflow and software they use to output their print files, and the procedure for including bleeds in your output file is different in every one of these scenarios. Sometimes, even with the right software, a lack of understanding of how bleeds work can lead to poor results. People that fall into this category might be asking:
A bleed is as any image or graphic that prints right up to the edge of the page. You can find examples of this everywhere on magazines, posters, post cards, business cards, brochures and much more.
A bleed is achieved by building a design that is slightly larger than the finished size, printing the job at that larger size, then cutting the sheet back to it's finish size. This results in us trimming the white border and some of the image area, thus creating the illusion that the job was printed right up to the edge of the paper. If a sheet is not trimmed, you'll end up with a white border around the image area called a gripper edge or gripper margin. This is the area the press grabs onto when it is pulling the sheet through.
Every program does it a little differently, but the principle remains the same in all of them: