Why do printers ask for crop marks and bleed?

When sending in artwork for printing, you will find that most printers will ask for 'print-ready' artwork.  

 

 

By providing print-ready artwork, you are confirming that what you've sent in is exactly how you want it to print (minus the printer marks that we will remove, but more about those later!) 

 

 

'Print-ready' means just as it suggests, the document you've sent in is ready to press print and go! 

 

 

In printer terms, 'print-ready' is the format in which it is sent and includes any relevant printer marks and if bleed is required, don't forget to add it! 

 

As printers, we would prefer you to send a document as a PDF file, even if the document was created in another program such as Microsoft Word. Our reason for this is that on the odd occasion we are working on different versions of Word and so the document you sent over looks perfectly fine on your computer, but when opened on ours, the formatting has gone awry!! 

 

 

If your design will 'bleed' off the edge of the paper (cover the entire page with no white border) we need to print that document on a larger sheet and trim to size. This is due to the printer not being capable of printing edge-to-edge on a sheet of paper. The crop marks are added so that we know which part of the document is 'bleed' and needs to be cropped off.