Understanding the Design Tool Guidelines

We use three standard Guidelines to let you know how to tailor your designs for each design area and product. These Guidelines are based on the processes used to print and produce each product we offer, so they will vary across products. For example, a t-shirt has different Guidelines than a greeting card.

Be sure to take a look at the Guidelines before you start designing for any product so that you don’t have to spend extra time making adjustments later on.

Safe Area

The Safe Area is highlighted with a red-dotted line when viewing your product in the ‘Design View.’ For best results, keep text and other important parts of your design, image, or photo INSIDE the Safe Area.

During the production of your product, some of the content outside the safe area may be trimmed or cropped out. Everything inside the safe area will be preserved.

FULL BLEED

‘Bleed’ is a printing term used to indicate the area that will be trimmed off after the job is printed and cut down to the finished size. A common technique is to place image subjects and text entirely within the dotted green Safe Line and let background colors, patterns, or background imagery extend to the solid red Bleed Line. This gives you a product that is printed all the way to the edge while ensuring that the important content is not cut off.

*We print what you create, so just remember to make sure any important parts of your design fall inside the Safe Area, and that your background image (if you are using one) covers the entire available design area.

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Design Tool Walkthrough