Add Document Bleed

When working with print content, there’s always a small margin of error in the alignment between your design and the cut edges of the paper. To hide this, we add a “bleed” to our documents, a bit of space where our art can stretch outside of the artboard. That way, if the cut is a bit out of whack, the people that see it will be none the wiser.

Whether your software doesn’t offer a bleed setting, or you just forgot to add it before creating your document, you can use GuideGuide with negative margin values to easily mark bleed boundaries.

1. Navigate to the Grid tab.

   

2. Select your artboard.

   

3. In the Margins section, make sure the Sync margin fields icon looks like a link.

   

4. In the Margins section, enter -.125in in any margin fields. They will all update.

   

5. Click the Add guides button.

   

By entering a negative value in the margin field, we tell GuideGuide to add the margins outside of the current context. This places guides ⅛ of an inch outside the thing you have selected. Now you can make sure your art goes far enough outside of the cut area or resize your canvas as needed.