- [Voiceover] In this movie, we'll discuss another
very important item that you need to consider
before printing a document, and that is bleed.
And bleed becomes very, very important.
That's B-L-E-E-D, by the way.
It becomes very important any time you're printing
all the way to the edges of a piece of paper.
So in the case of this logo, for example,
I'll press Control+0, or Command+0 on the Mac,
to zoom out so that I can see the edges of the art board.
We don't need bleed where this logo is concerned,
and that's because I'm not printing the artwork
to the very edges of the paper.
All the artwork, as you can see, is surrounded by white,
and that is paper white, incidentally.
And if you wanna confirm that, then you can go
to the View menu and choose Show Transparency Grid,
that command that we saw in the previous movie,
and in this case I still have my light checkerboard pattern.
But in any event, wherever you see that checkerboard,
that indicates transparency inside the document.
And because we have transparency
all the way to the edge of the art board,
we don't need to worry about bleed.
Compare that to this document right here.
And so if I press Control+0, or Command+0 on the Mac,
you can see that I'm printing all the way
to the edges of the art board.
And the art board is your indicator
of the page size, incidentally, and we'll see
what that means in more detail in later movies.
But for now, just consider what
could happen if you don't have a bleed.
Now you might look at this and say,
"Hey, I'm totally covered here
"because I have all this extra artwork."
Well, Illustrator doesn't actually see
that extra artwork until you add
a bleed to your document.
And the reason this is so important
is best demonstrated in Photoshop.
So I'm gonna go ahead and switch over
to Photoshop for a moment, and notice
that I have three layers here inside my layers panel,
the bottom-most of which is called Paper.
And so that paper layer represents
the white paper in the background.
Now go ahead and turn on this No Bleed layer right here,
which is my artwork without a bleed.
And notice what happens if I switch to the move tool,
which is located up here at the top of the tool box.
And if you're not that familiar with Photoshop,
don't worry about it, this is just a demo.
But notice what happens if I go ahead
and click on that layer to make it active,
and then I drag it a little bit like so.
I'm gonna reveal that white paper in the background.
Now it's probably not gonna look that bad,
it's gonna look more like this,
let's say, with just a little bit
of extra white right there at the edge.
And this is a function of what's known as misregistration.
And so, any commercial printer is gonna do their best
to make sure that they register your artwork
to the page, but they do need a little bit of latitude.
And that latitude is provided in the form of bleed.
And so to demonstrate what that looks like,
I'll go ahead and turn off this No Bleed layer
and turn off the With Bleed layer right there.
And notice if I click on it and drag it around,
even though I'm moving this artwork on the page,
I'd have to move it really far to expose white paper.
But if I just move it a little bit,
then by virtue of the fact that I have a bleed,
I'm gonna reveal extra artwork.
So the whole purpose of the bleed
is to give you a little bit of extra leeway
in the event of misregistration, which happens all the time.
It's just a natural function of printing,
whether you're printing locally,
to an inkjet printer, for example,
or whether you're submitting the artwork
to a commercial printer.
And so to set up a bleed, what you do
is you switch back to Illustrator, of course,
and then you make sure your black arrow tool is selected
up here at the top of the tool box,
and then you click on the Document Setup button
up here in the control panel.
And this is something you wanna do
every single time you plan on printing your artwork
all the way to the edges of the art board.
And this, by the way, counts whether you're printing
to one edge, or all four edges.
It's still something you wanna do.
And so notice this Bleed option right there.
Just go ahead and select any one of these values.
Make sure that the link icon is turned on,
assuming that you wanna set a bleed all the way around,
and then just dial in something like .25 in
and press the Tab key and you'll see
that gets converted to 18 points.
Now 18 points is a ton of bleed.
Most commercial printers don't need anything like that.
But, if you ask me, better safe than sorry.
And so I'll just go ahead and crank that bleed value up to
a quarter inch, that is 18 points, and then click OK.
And now you can see this red border right here,
which represents the bleed, and that's gonna give you
a little bit of extra wiggle room.
That's gonna come in very handy
when you print this document, at which point,
you wanna go up to the File menu
and choose the Save command,
or if you wanna give this file a different name,
go ahead and choose Save As instead
because the bleed is an attribute
that's saved along with your document.
And that's how you add a bleed,
which is something that you wanna do
every single time you're considering
borderless printing here inside Illustrator.