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Bleed!? – Preserving the Appearance of Your Complex Imagery in Heat Transfer and Print


Bleed!? – Preserving the Appearance of Your Complex Imagery in Heat Transfer and Print

…If you’ve ever come to us with a particularly tricky/awesome design for heat transfer, a banner, or poster you may have heard us say something about bleed…

There are things we say every day at 1800 For Promo – CCV, decal, hi-tack, bubble-free, block-out, cast, LG, outlined, PMS…

This kind of in-house language allows us to communicate common processes that we deal with regularly, but when these acronyms and jargon-words appear on the Mock Ups that we give to you, to other clients, and to businesses (all in your own industries with your own unique ways of business-talking) we really need to take the time to explain what these things actually mean. Being on the same page allows the production process to run smoothly, accurately, and transparently (i.e. It’s better if you know what we are up to!).

Today I’m cracking down on the term Bleed.

Bleed is either 1) a solid colour that must be included behind and around an image; or 2) excess image.

Yes, to make this complicated there are two different kinds of bleed that we talk about – sometimes the final product will include a bleed, whereas at other times the bleed is trimmed from the final product. Typically,

1)  For Heat Transfer:  a black shirt for example, a Mock-up might say “with black bleed”, and include an image of your logo with a black background that surrounds the logo. This black bleed stops at a contour line that we’ve traced around the appearance of your original logo. This contour line – this bleed line – becomes the cut line for your final transfer.

 2)  For Print: a poster or banner for example, we might ask you* for a 5mm bleed – this 5mm will be cut off so that your image comes right to the edge of the page and there is no risk of ending up with an unwanted white border around the image. When you provide 5mm excess it ensures that all your important visual info is not trimmed from the final product.

So generally, if a Mock Up for (usually) a heat transfer job says “with bleed” this kind of bleed will be retained – visible on the final product. However, if in our conversations we ask you to provide bleed in your artwork this kind of bleed will be trimmed – cut off from the final (poster, banner, canvas…) print. 

* Let us know if you’re not sure how to do this yourself, or if you’re having trouble with particularly tricky artwork, and we can either explain the process or generate a bleed for you if necessary.  

Why bleed?

When we start dealing with parts of a logo/image for a heat transfer that will end up being less that 2mm in width or height, or if there is a complex mass that involves dozens of small bits and pieces, or if an image fades out at its edges, we need to incorporate the colour of the apparel as a printed background to either

1) increase the cut size and surface area of the transfer (so that it’ll actually stick);

2) to simplify a contour line (so there isn’t a wild jagged edge to your transfer (unless that’s what you want of course)); or

3) to avoid a sudden cutline that interrupts a fading image. Of course, today I am just talking about when you want your branding done as a heat transfer, but there are always other options to consider: screen-printing or embroidery.

As for printed posters and banners, we can trim pretty close to an edge if you don’t have much excess image to work with (trimming 1-2mm off only), but this really depends on the size of your print – the bigger it gets the more the image border will deviate from a straight line when the ink dries.  We prefer a 5mm bleed. For canvas prints a bleed might need to be closer to 20mm to allow for the wrap around the frame.

Cut decals, sorry, I mean printed adhesive stickers with optional lamination and often cut to shape (I’m not sure how I almost forgot about these) are typically machine-cut by our printer. If your decal looks like a poster (a simple shape like a large rectangle, square, or circle), it helps if you are able to provide an excess bleed (to be trimmed off) as with any poster or banner. However, with more complex decals where the cut lines are trickier to work with we prefer to make the bleed for these in-house and normally will not ask you to provide a decal bleed.  Of course, if you are sticking complex decals onto a coloured surface we will treat those as we would treat complex heat transfers – we’ll colour match the colour and include a solid colour bleed in the final decal with a simplified cut contour line.

To get the right bleed colour we spend time Colour Matching and this will be detailed in another blog soon to come, but for today I’ll finish up with a few captioned images of the kinds of bleed (and kinds of jobs) that I’ve been talking about and the kinds of bleed jobs we’ve been producing this week!