Guide · Updated 4 September 2026 · 4 min read
What do bleed, trim and safe zone mean on a business card?
Trim is the line the card is cut on. Bleed is the 3 mm of extra artwork past that line, so a slightly off-centre cut never shows white paper. The safe zone is the area 4 mm inside the trim, where anything that must survive the cut, text and the QR code, has to sit.
Why the cut is never exact
Cards are printed many to a sheet and cut in a stack on a guillotine. The blade lands within a fraction of a millimetre of the line, but not on it, and the sheets shift very slightly as the stack is squared. Every rule below exists to make that error invisible.
Bleed: run the colour past the edge
Anything that should reach the edge of the finished card has to be drawn beyond it. A background, a coloured band, a photograph, a panel down one side: all of it continues 3 mm past the trim, into the bleed. When the cut lands a quarter of a millimetre outside the line, the bleed is what gets cut instead of white paper.
The common mistake is to stop the background exactly at the trim. It looks right on screen, where the trim is the edge of the artboard, and prints with a white sliver down one side of half the batch.
Safe zone: keep the type away from the edge
The same cutting error works in the other direction. A line of type set 1 mm from the trim is 1 mm from being cut in half. The safe zone is the area 4 mm inside the trim, and anything that must arrive intact stays inside it: names, numbers, the email address, the QR code.
A QR code is the element where this matters most. Clip one corner of a code and it loses a finder pattern, and a code without its finder patterns does not scan at all. It does not look slightly wrong; it stops working.
The element that is neither
There is one position that is always wrong: an element that crosses the trim line but stops short of the bleed edge. It is neither safely inside the card nor bleeding off it, so the cut lands part way through and it comes back sliced. A decorative panel that reaches 1 mm past the trim is this. Either pull it inside the safe zone or push it all the way out to the bleed.
The numbers for a UK card
| Rectangle | Size | Measured from the bleed edge |
|---|---|---|
| Bleed box (the file) | 91 × 61 mm | 0 mm |
| Trim (the card) | 85 × 55 mm | 3 mm |
| Safe zone (the type) | 77 × 47 mm | 7 mm |
How Cardsetting checks this
The engine renders each side and measures the result rather than trusting the layout. Text outside the safe zone is an error and the card is not shown. A QR code outside it is an error for the same reason. A painted element straddling the trim without reaching the bleed is reported as artwork that will come back sliced. Backgrounds are expected to reach the bleed edge, so there is deliberately no rule that says everything must stay inside: bleed and safe zone are opposite instructions for different elements.
Questions people also ask
- Do I need bleed if my card has a white background?
- The file still has to be the bleed size, 91 × 61 mm, because the printer's imposition expects it. But with nothing but white reaching the edge, there is nothing to run past the trim, so a white card is the one design that cannot show a white sliver.
- Can text go in the bleed area?
- No. Anything in the bleed is cut off by design. Text belongs in the safe zone, 4 mm inside the trim, which on a UK card is 7 mm in from the edge of the file.
- What are crop marks?
- Short lines drawn outside the bleed area at each corner, showing the printer where the trim line is. They never appear on the finished card because everything beyond the trim is cut away.