We advise a minimum of 3mm bleed and the reason for this is that when we’re cutting on our guillotines, and it is the same across the industry, there is always a small tolerance. The print on the sheet could’ve moved by half a mm, the guillotine blade could have moved by half a mm, there’s always a bit of tolerance. Nothing is exactly bang on because it’s not done by laser or robot.

So what bleed in printing means is that when you trim there’s no white areas showing on the edge. So rather than have potentially some white areas showing, you increase the image size that you’re hoping to print by 3mm on each side. We then trim exactly where we need to. It just creates a bit of tolerance in case of any overlap.