How to design great-looking business cards with print-bleed
Adding print bleed to your business cards and other documents is an excellent way to give them terrific professional look.
In essence, bleed is required on any document that needs either colour or an image to go right to the edge of the paper.
This Tutorial concentrates on doing the print bleed via common graphic design package by Adobe called "InDesign". To add bleed to your business cards, follow these steps:
1. Firstly from the start menu lets choose "Create New Document"
2. You should be seeing the preference page for a new document and starting from the page size menu lets choose "Custom"
3. For the purposes of this tutorial we will create a business card with bleed
4. The common size for an Australian business card is 90 x 55mm, so lets enter these details in the width and height fields.
5. The orientation selection is here just to the right, we are choosing landscape today.
6. We can skip over columns as we don not need any column setup
7. The Margins should be set to 3mm, the purpose is to set a margin that contains any text or logos that you would like to be visible on your card. Any text or logos that sit outside of this Margin are at risk of being cut off.
8. By linking the chain here you will only have to enter the margin once for all sides
9. The next field down is the field for bleed and slug. Set your bleed to a minimum 3mm and a maximum of 5mm. In this case I will set the bleed for 3mm.
10. The slug setting is not required for Business cards
11. As we are creating a single sided card 1 page will be sufficient and you can untick facing pages as this is for multi page publications
12. Ok, We are ready to get started so lets save this setup for future use by clicking the "Save Preset" Button. I am going to call this preset "Business card - Landscape". You will now note this is in the document preset box for future use.
13. So Lets design our card, Press "ok" to create the new document. Here we have our blank card ready for inspiration. The lines here are guides for you that will not show up on the final document.
14. The red outer line is the "Bleed Line" the middle black line is the edge of your business card and is know as the "Cut Line"
and the inner purple line is the "margin".
15.On this pre-designed sample you can see how these lines work. The Background and the coffee cup image are intended to go right to the edge of the card so they extend out to the "bleed line". All the text sits within the 3mm margin and the black line indicates where the edge of the card is.
16. To show you a cleaner picture of how your card will look. go to the "view menu" and choose "Screen mode" from the options choose "preview" to go back to showing all the lines choose "normal" mode.
17. Go to the file menu and choose export.
18. Make sure that you know where you are going to save your completed file, for this tutorial we will choose "desktop".
19. Ensure that the save format is "pdf" and name your file.
20. Click the save button to choose your preferences.
21. Using the PDF presets menu, choose either PDF/X-4:2007 or PDF/X-3:2002. if the former is not available.
The page range should be set to current page. No changes to compression are required.
In the Marks and bleeds menu choose "Crop marks" this indicates to us where the "cut line" is when printing.
Also select "Use Document bleed settings" box. This will carry through to your pdf file the bleed setting we setup earlier.
All other settings can remain the same.
22. Finally lets click the "export" button.
This should now save a print ready file to your desktop ready to upload to your printer.
In essence, bleed is required on any document that needs either colour or an image to go right to the edge of the paper.
This Tutorial concentrates on doing the print bleed via common graphic design package by Adobe called "InDesign". To add bleed to your business cards, follow these steps:
1. Firstly from the start menu lets choose "Create New Document"
2. You should be seeing the preference page for a new document and starting from the page size menu lets choose "Custom"
3. For the purposes of this tutorial we will create a business card with bleed
4. The common size for an Australian business card is 90 x 55mm, so lets enter these details in the width and height fields.
5. The orientation selection is here just to the right, we are choosing landscape today.
6. We can skip over columns as we don not need any column setup
7. The Margins should be set to 3mm, the purpose is to set a margin that contains any text or logos that you would like to be visible on your card. Any text or logos that sit outside of this Margin are at risk of being cut off.
8. By linking the chain here you will only have to enter the margin once for all sides
9. The next field down is the field for bleed and slug. Set your bleed to a minimum 3mm and a maximum of 5mm. In this case I will set the bleed for 3mm.
10. The slug setting is not required for Business cards
11. As we are creating a single sided card 1 page will be sufficient and you can untick facing pages as this is for multi page publications
12. Ok, We are ready to get started so lets save this setup for future use by clicking the "Save Preset" Button. I am going to call this preset "Business card - Landscape". You will now note this is in the document preset box for future use.
13. So Lets design our card, Press "ok" to create the new document. Here we have our blank card ready for inspiration. The lines here are guides for you that will not show up on the final document.
14. The red outer line is the "Bleed Line" the middle black line is the edge of your business card and is know as the "Cut Line"
and the inner purple line is the "margin".
15.On this pre-designed sample you can see how these lines work. The Background and the coffee cup image are intended to go right to the edge of the card so they extend out to the "bleed line". All the text sits within the 3mm margin and the black line indicates where the edge of the card is.
16. To show you a cleaner picture of how your card will look. go to the "view menu" and choose "Screen mode" from the options choose "preview" to go back to showing all the lines choose "normal" mode.
17. Go to the file menu and choose export.
18. Make sure that you know where you are going to save your completed file, for this tutorial we will choose "desktop".
19. Ensure that the save format is "pdf" and name your file.
20. Click the save button to choose your preferences.
21. Using the PDF presets menu, choose either PDF/X-4:2007 or PDF/X-3:2002. if the former is not available.
The page range should be set to current page. No changes to compression are required.
In the Marks and bleeds menu choose "Crop marks" this indicates to us where the "cut line" is when printing.
Also select "Use Document bleed settings" box. This will carry through to your pdf file the bleed setting we setup earlier.
All other settings can remain the same.
22. Finally lets click the "export" button.
This should now save a print ready file to your desktop ready to upload to your printer.
Source...