How to Prepare Print-Ready Artwork: Bleed, CMYK and Resolution Explained

Most print problems are not printing problems at all — they are artwork problems that were baked in before the file ever reached the press. White slivers along an edge, colours that look duller than they did on screen, fuzzy logos: almost all of it traces back to three settings. Get bleed, colour mode and resolution right and your print will come back looking exactly as you intended.

Bleed: why your design needs to run off the edge

Commercial printing prints onto a larger sheet and then trims it down to size. No guillotine cuts to within a fraction of a millimetre every time, so if your background stops exactly at the trim line, any tiny shift leaves a thin white edge. Bleed solves this: you extend backgrounds and images 3mm beyond the final size so that, whatever way the cut lands, the colour runs right to the edge.

The flip side of bleed is the safe area. Keep anything important — text, logos, contact details — at least 3mm inside the trim line. That margin guarantees nothing critical gets clipped if the cut shifts slightly inward.

• Document size: your final trim size (e.g. A5 is 148 × 210mm)
• Bleed: add 3mm on every side
• Safe area: keep key content 3mm inside the trim

CMYK vs RGB: print uses ink, not light

Screens create colour by mixing red, green and blue light (RGB). Printing creates colour by layering cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink (CMYK). The two do not map perfectly — RGB can produce vivid, glowing colours that simply cannot be reproduced with ink, particularly bright blues, greens and oranges.

If you design in RGB and send it to print, those out-of-gamut colours get converted on press and can shift noticeably — usually looking flatter or darker than expected. Set your document to CMYK from the start so what you see is much closer to what you get. If a specific brand colour is critical, tell us and we can advise on the closest reliable match.

Designing in CMYK from the outset removes the single most common cause of "but it looked brighter on my screen".

Resolution: 300 DPI at final size

Resolution is how much detail an image holds. For print, you want 300 DPI (dots per inch) at the actual size the image will appear. An image that looks crisp on a website might be only 72 DPI — fine for a screen, but it will look soft or pixelated once printed. Crucially, you cannot create detail that is not there: scaling a small image up to fill an A3 poster will not make it sharp.

Always start from the largest, highest-quality version of any image — especially logos and photography. Vector logos (AI, EPS or SVG) are ideal because they stay razor-sharp at any size.

Exporting the right PDF

When everything is set, export a PDF — the industry standard for print. Choose a press preset such as PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4, embed your fonts (or outline them), and make sure bleed is included in the export. That single file carries your size, bleed, colour and fonts in one reliable package.

Not a designer? That is exactly what our free artwork check is for. Send us your file and we will review bleed, resolution and colour before anything goes to press — and flag anything that needs attention.