Colour Modes, Bleed, Trim and Safe Zones

The first steps to setting up your artwork for commercial printing.

Printing Colour Modes:

CMYK (full colour): Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
Percentage values are assigned to these four inks, creating the full colour spectrum.
If you’re designing artwork for a website, you’d use RGB, whereas print mainly uses CMYK or PMS, Pantone Matching System.
If your artwork has an RGB Colour mode we will convert to CMYK, a slight colour variance may occur.

Bleed Area:

The Bleed Area is like an extension to your artwork, if you’re wanting your design to extend to the edge of the page, you extend your design to fill this area. This area will be trimmed from your final document to eliminate any unwanted borders. The Bleed Area is normally set to 2mm on all edges of the artwork.
Booklet printing requires a minimum of 5mm bleed on all edges.

Trim:

Where your design is to be guillotined to produce the product’s finished size.
Crop Marks (thin lines placed on the corners of the artwork) indicate where the paper should be trimmed after printing. Crop Marks are important for any artwork, especially if the design Bleeds to the edge.

Safe Zones:

The Safe Zone is 3mm from the trim line. Make sure all important text and design elements are kept within this area. Areas outside of the Safe Zone may be trimmed.

Booklet Binding:

Perfect binding uses ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) adhesives whereas PUR uses polyurethane reactive (PUR) adhesives. PUR adhesive offers increased binding strength.
Booklet “creep” will occur during finishing so we recommend you keep text and non-bleed images at least 10mm from the trim line.

Rich Blacks

We strongly recommend you use CMYK Rich Black on large areas of black to ensure a nice solid result. A good mixture for CMYK Rich Black on;

• Heavier stock weights use 60 / 50 / 50 / 100
• Lighter stock weights use 30 / 0 / 0 / 100

Below is a general guide for Australian paper sizes.

Remember width proceeds height.

A SERIES
Paper Sizes

Business Cards

DL

A7

A6

A5

A4

A3

A2

A1

A0

Size in Millimeters – mm
(without bleed area)

90mm x 55mm

210mm x 99mm

74mm x 105mm

105mm x 148mm

148mm x 210mm

210mm x 297mm

297mm x 420mm

420mm x 594mm

594mm x 841mm

841mm x 1188mm

Size in Millimeters – mm
(with 2mm bleed area)

94mm x 59mm

214mm x 103mm

78mm x 109mm

109mm x 152mm

152mm x 214mm

214mm x 301mm

307mm x 430mm*

430mm x 604mm*

604mm x 851mm*

851mm x 1198mm*

*5mm bleed added for Booklets.

Australian Envelope Size Guide