Why do I need this information?
It is important to correctly place items on a page in order to control where they fall in relation to the physical features of your job. You need to consider folding, creasing and guillotining.

Example business card job
Please study the image/diagrams below carefully. Though it shows the image and text positioning for an 85x55mm business card the same requirements apply to all jobs. We have shown the minimum clearence amounts you should leave for safety though in practice you will not usually work right upto these limits.



As you can see in the above example the main subject of the picture - the satellite dish tower - is kept within the green safety area as is the text above it. The background of the picture however, is big enough to cover the whole of the 2mm bleed area beyond the edge of the card.

Points to watch !!
1. Although we take every care when cutting your job no guillotine or operator can ever be guaranteed to be totally accurate. There will be slight variations in the size and trim position of the finished piece. For this reason it is good practice that all important objects are kept within the green area.
2. Images that you intend to bleed over the edge of the job should extend to fill the full 2mm of bleed area as shown above. By doing this you ensure that if the trim position does wander slightly you will not be left with an unsightly thin white edge to your job.
3. The white dotted line shows the approximate position of the guillotined edge - there will be slight variation.
4. Try to avoid straight line borders that run closely parallel to the guillotined edge, especially of cards. The human eye is a very good tool for making comparisons. If, for example, you were to place a box border over the green dotted line (2mm in from the edge of the card all round) and our cutting was inaccurate by only a quarter of a millimetre your eye would pick this out immediately. You would easily see that the gap between the border and the edge of the card was 1.75mm at one side and (assuming the card was 0.25mm undersize) 2.0 mm at the other side.

This is how the card example above would look when cut down along the white dotted line. All text and objects have been placed at the extreme edge of the green area and as you can see, they still look reasonably balanced.

The 2mm Minimum Rule
Don't place important page content closer than 2mm to a cut, fold, perf, crease, etc.. In practice you will place things to suit the aesthetics of your job but as explained above - venture less than 2mm carefully and with good reason.

Artwork Layout Templates
We have created a series of artwork layout templates for you to download. Whether you use them or not is entirely up to you but they are a good starting point from which you can work.   Templates download page.