Gutter Bleed Design

And for some book layouts properly applying bleed settings can be the difference between professional design and not.

Gutter bleed design. The dotted green line represents gutter. There are many spreads with the same full page left hand background texture art that will need to bleed into the gutter. They all have the same sets of master pages. Scroll and then click bleed and slug to expand the panel.

For example you can type 0 125 in or 3 mm even if your document uses picas or something else. Spreads can be very difficult to design for when producing perfect bound books or hard cover books due to the gutter. If spreads are very important to the overall look and feel of your book we recommend binding types that lay flat such as saddle stitched booklets spiral bound booklets or wire o booklets. For example if you are designing a postcard with an image you want to cover the entire background you would need the image to extend beyond the edge of your design by 125 inches typical bleed size.

A full bleed describes when a project has been designed with an image or images that touches the cut edge on all four sides. I am creating it in sections to eventually gather the section files into an indesign book. We touched on full bleed printing last week when we looked at making a print ready pdf. I am deep into the design of a wiro bound reference book that is over 400 pages.

In the book printing world bleed in particular is an important concept to understand. Type a bleed value in any units. Today let s look a little deeper at this.