Understanding and learning to love Ticks and Bleeds

If you’re new to design it won’t be long before you start to hear about ticks and bleeds but what do they mean?. Well simply put, Ticks (sometimes called Crop Marks) are the little lines on your document showing where the print needs to be trimmed and the Bleed is a little bit of wiggle room to make sure your graphics run right up to the edge of the page.

They are needed because a printer can’t print right up to the edge of the paper, you might have noticed this if you’ve ever printed a graphic on the office printer and you always get a narrow margin of the white paper around the edge. To get your design to reach the edge, you have to print on a bigger piece of paper and then trim it down to size, the bleed and tick marks help ensure the final trim removes any white margin.

So let’s see what that looks like, below is a sample leaflet, if you look closely you can see the tick or crop marks in the four corners, these represent the cutting lines of where the flyer needs to be trimmed.

Now let’s zoom in to take a closer look at the bleed. You can see that the graphics on the flyer have been extended over the actual trim lines. This means that if the cut is slightly “off” you don’t risk getting a thin white line around the edge of the flyer. It’s difficult for a printer to get the cut spot on because of the nature of paper, it can expand in the heat, it can shrink in the cold or a tiny movement on the print press can also mean the cut may not be “bang-on” target.

If you have access to a specialised design package like the Adobe Creative Suite it’s very easy to create print ready artwork including the necessary ticks and bleed, here’s a helpful step by step guide on how to do this. If you are using Canva, you can find guidance on margins, rulers, bleed and crop marks here. However if you haven’t got this sort of package and using something like Word or Powerpoint, it’s a bit more tricky. Don’t worry we can help, just get in touch.