A small product like a business card may only need 2 to 3 millimetres, while a banner needs up to 50 millimetres and some billboards require several metres. Check with your supplier how much they need for the product you are producing.

Now that you know how much bleed is required, make sure you choose images that take this into account. If you are creating a billboard with an ocean panoramic background and there is a yacht on one edge, make sure that the yacht will fall inside the document area and not within the bleed area.

Another critical point to know about bleed is that you will have to continue any background patterns into the bleed area. This becomes important if you are creating this layer in Photoshop as you don’t want to be forced to try to stretch out your creation to fit or even worse – to have to go back and recreate the file because you forgot about bleed. It is a costly, frustrating and time-consuming error to fix and as you can see it can be easily avoided.