Guide

Why business cards need 3mm of bleed

An AI tool usually gives you a design at exactly the finished size. But print shops don't cut exactly on that line — the blade shifts by a fraction of a millimeter from card to card. A file with no margin for that ends up with a thin white sliver at the edge, or a crooked-looking background, once it's cut.

What bleed does

That's why the actual print file is made larger than the finished size (90mm × 50mm) by 3mm on every side. That extra margin is the “bleed.” Fill it with your background color or pattern all the way to the edge, and even a slightly off cut won't leave a white line. Canvas size including that margin comes out to 96mm × 56mm.

The safe margin matters too

In the other direction, anything important — a logo, a phone number — needs to sit at least 3mm in from the finished edge. That's the buffer that keeps text from getting clipped if the cut drifts inward. Bleed means “fill more outward,” safe margin means “leave more empty inward” — opposite directions, easy to mix up.

Most AI designs don't have this

Image-generation AI doesn't know what bleed is — it draws right up to the exact finished size. Sent as-is to a print shop, that file gets rejected at intake, or comes back with an awkward-looking edge after cutting.