Print specs · 4 min read

Business card bleed, trim and safe area

Cards are printed several to a sheet and then cut down in a stack. The blade is accurate to about a thirty-second of an inch, not to the pixel, so the design has to survive a little drift in either direction. Bleed and the safe area are how it survives.

The three boxes

A BotPrints card is built on a canvas of 3.625″ × 2.125″, which is 1088 × 638 pixels at 300 dpi. That is the bleed size, and it is bigger than the card you get.

The blade cuts at 3.5″ × 2″. That line is the trim. Everything outside it is thrown away, which is the whole point: if your background runs all the way to the bleed edge, then wherever the blade actually lands there is still ink there, and you get a clean printed edge instead of a white sliver.

The safe area sits 1/8″ inside the trim. Anything you would be upset to lose — your name, your phone number, a logo — belongs inside it. The editor draws all three of these lines for you while you work.

What goes wrong without it

• A background that stops exactly at 3.5 inches leaves a hairline of bare stock along one edge when the cut drifts outward.
• A phone number set 2mm from the trim looks fine on screen and comes back with the last digit shaved.
• A border drawn right on the trim line is the cruellest one: any drift at all makes it thicker on one side than the other, and the eye catches that instantly.

Designing to it

Push photographs and colour fields all the way out to the bleed edge. Pull type in past the safe line. Leave the middle third of the card doing the work, because that is the part no blade will ever reach.

If you upload a print-ready file rather than designing in the app, export it at the bleed size with the artwork already extended, not at the finished size. Scaling a finished-size file up to cover bleed crops your layout by an eighth of an inch on every side.

Common questions

How much bleed does a business card need?

An eighth of an inch total, which is a sixteenth of an inch on each edge. That makes the working canvas 3.625 by 2.125 inches for a standard 3.5 by 2 inch card.

Why is my text getting cut off?

It was placed outside the safe area. Keep text at least an eighth of an inch inside the trim line so it survives normal cutting drift.