Drift and Bleed

When it comes to manufacturing things like card games and books, technology has come a long way. But it’s not perfect. Printers are machines with sensitive moving parts, and sometimes, they slip out of alignment and don’t work like they should. Yep, even robots have bad days.

In the jargon of graphic design, “drift” and “bleed” are way less cool than they sound. Drift refers to the tendency of printed products to come out off-center due to normal mechanical misalignment, and bleed is the extra space designers leave around the intended edge of their card or page to make up for any drift that happens.

And it happens a lot. Almost every printed product is affected by drift to some degree, even if it’s only a millimeter or two.

In the photo above, I measured the width of the border on the left and right sides of a printed Villages card with noticeable drift. There was roughly a 23% difference between the two sides.

Despite this, the card still looks fine overall. This is because I gave the card file some bleed–I made the file dimensions a little bigger than the final product and extended the black border beyond the intended edge of the card. If I hadn’t done this, even the smallest amount of drift would be really obvious. You’d be able to see a white stripe of blank, non-printed cardstock down the right side.

Here’s another example. This is The Game Crafter’s poker card template. A finished poker card is 2.5″ wide by 3.5″ tall. But the files you are required to upload actually measure 2.75″ by 3.75″. This is because there is an extra 1/8″ (or 0.125″) of bleed on each side of the card. This is represented by the red trim line and dark gray outer area on the template. Anything beyond the trim line will be trimmed away, but because of drift, your entire card will be a little off-center, so you need to account for that by also filling in the bleed zone.

This is what a Villages card looks like with the bleed and safe zone overlay turned on. On the final file, the yellow border extends all the way through the red zone.

By making your file dimensions bigger than your final product and extending your background artwork past the intended edge of the card, you can hide the effects of drift–at least somewhat.

In case you were wondering, this is why the Villages Cardsmith Kit has a toggle for the “Full Border” and “Cut Border” version of the card. The cut version looks more like the finished product, but the full border includes the extra bleed area required for printing.

If you have any other questions about drift and bleed or other graphic design topics, leave them in a comment below. Thanks for reading, and happy crafting!