Trim
The line where the paper is actually cut. It's the finished size of the piece in your hand.
Wtf is Bleed? Relax. It's a printing term.
Before it was our name, bleed was a rule every designer learns the hard way. Here's what it means in the real world, and why we named a company after it.
Bleed is the part of a design that runs past the edge.
Business cards, posters, flyers and packaging aren't printed at their final size. They're printed on a bigger sheet and then cut down. The line where the blade cuts is called the trim.
Blades are fast, but never perfectly precise. Every cut drifts a little. If your colors stop exactly at the trim line, even a tiny drift leaves a thin white edge that makes the whole piece look cheap.
So designers stretch the artwork past the trim, usually 3 mm (⅛ inch) on every side. That extra strip is the bleed. It gets printed, cut off and thrown away. Nobody ever sees it, but everybody notices when it's missing.
Move the blade.
Every cut drifts a little. Drag the slider and watch what bleed does about it.
Trim line (where it should cut)
Where the blade actually cut
Three lines on every print job.
Bleed
Artwork that extends past the trim, usually 3 mm, so the color survives a cut that isn't perfect.
Safe zone
The area inside the trim where text and logos live, so nothing important gets clipped.
We build past the edge.
Most AI stops exactly at the line: the template answer, the generic layout, the text every detector recognizes. It looks fine, until the blade drifts. Bleed is our rule for doing the extra 3 mm. B1o goes past robotic text. C2o goes past templates. So what you ship never shows a white edge.
And no, it has nothing to do with anything medical. Just really good printing.