What does bleed allowance / trim mean?

The bleed allowance or trim is the area that should be added to a printed product beyond the actual print format. The reason for this is that our printed products are usually cut to their final format after printing on a printing sheet. The bleed makes it easier for us to work cleanly and without problems.

When creating your print data, please always allow for a bleed of at least 2 mm all round!

In concrete terms, this means that background images and graphics should always be created with a bleed allowance of 2 mm beyond the actual format. Your print data in open format is therefore 6 mm wider and higher than the actual format. For example, for DIN A4, the format including the bleed is 303 x 216 mm.

If there is no bleed allowance or if it is too small, machine-related cutting tolerances may result in minimal deviations and thus white edges.