designing my leaflets

zmangan

Junior Member
Im trying to design my own business cards and leaflets so i can print them more cheaply. I understand that you need to create your designs in certain printing resolutions and add something called bleed? Ive bought a copy of Adobe photoshop but cant find any option for adding bleed.

Any experienced graphic designers out there who can help!!!?
 
Hey, usually most printers require you to add a 3mm bleed to business cards and leaflets before printing. So if your designing an A5 leaflet which is 148x210mm, your finished design to the printers needs to be 156x216mm.

If your using photoshop, you can add this by just making your canvas size 6mm higher and wider. Stretch any images and backgrounds to the end of the border and bear in mind that all this will be cut off.

The bleed on your leaflet gives the cutter some room for error (most leaflets will be printed litho on huge sheets of paper and need to be cut out afterwards). The paper itself can expand or contract, the cropping machine could setup wrong or the person working on the leaflet could make a mistake. There are a lot of factors that could go wrong with the cropping, if you wouldn't be using bleed the images wouldn't be neatly aligned with the side of your printed document

You also need to set the colour scheme to CMYK and make sure that the resolution is in 300dpi. CMYK gives the best view of what the colours will look like once printed, and is the correct colour setup for printing.
 
[thanks for that, spent long time trying to figure that out! My leaflet is to be folded and handed out door to door. Ive had a look at a few printing sites and they offer folding but not say how they are folded, ive seen of a z fold and a letterfold but I don’t know what they are. I want it t be folded like a takeaway menu, but how is this?
 
Theres lots of different folds out there, and most printers will offer some of them. If you need illustrations have a look at printers I use called sk print design SK Print Design - full colour printing and website design
Theres illustrations different types folds including the more popular letter folds, z folds and gatefolds here: Download Leaflet Design Templates, Illustrations and Pictures of Folded Leaflets | SK Print Design
Send me a copy of your design when you’ve finished and I’ll have a look at it for you if you want - junglebum05(AT)hotmail.co.uk
 
http://www.scubaprint.com/docs/pdf-for-print.pdf

This might help you to grasp the concept of bleed/crop marks etc.

Ideally you want to be exporting the finial product for print from indesign or similar (you also ideally want to be setting all your text etc here, then you can add crops bleed etc on export to pdf).

Designing your own material will not save you money on print as it will more than likely mean the printers will need to alter the file to make it print ready (adding cost). Designing your own will save money on a designer but potentially add money to your print if you cannot supply a print ready file as the printers need.
 
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