What is bleed?

Bleed is the part of your artwork that deliberately runs off the page. It sounds wasteful — until you see a stack of programs with a white sliver down one side, and then it makes perfect sense.

The one-minute version

Printers don't print one card at a time. They print your design on a sheet, then cut it down to size with a blade. Paper shifts — a fraction of a millimetre — as it moves through the press and the cutter. If your background colour or photo stops exactly at the edge of the page (the trim line), that tiny shift exposes a hairline of blank paper on one side.

Bleed is insurance against the shift: you extend the background 0.125 inches (⅛″, about 3 mm) past the trim line on every side. Now the blade always lands inside your artwork, and the colour runs cleanly off every edge, exactly as you designed it.

The three lines on every print file

• Bleed line — the outside edge of your file. Backgrounds and photos must reach it. For a 5 × 7 card, the file with bleed is 5.25 × 7.25 inches.
• Trim line — where the blade cuts. This is the finished size your customer holds.
• Safe zone — 0.25 inches inside the trim. Text, logos and faces stay in here, so nothing important is ever nicked by the blade or lost in a fold.

How much bleed do I add?

0.125 inches on every side is the industry standard — that adds 0.25 inches to each dimension of your file. A few common sizes:

Adding bleed in Canva

• Open your design and go to File → View settings → Show print bleed. The bleed border appears around your page.
• Drag backgrounds and photos so they stretch all the way to the bleed border — not just to the page edge.
• Pull any text that drifted into the bleed area back inside the safe zone.
• When you download, choose PDF Print and tick Crop marks and bleed.