Bleed, Trim and Safe Zone Explained: Why Your Printed Cards Have White Edges
White slivers on the edge of a card, or text that's been half cut off, both come from the same three lines. Here's what bleed, trim and the safe zone mean, how big each should be, and how to set up your cards so every cut looks clean.
· 4 min read
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You print your cards, cut them out, and there it is: a thin white sliver down one edge. Or worse, the cost in the corner is half cut off. Neither means you cut badly. It means the file wasn't set up for the way cutting really works, which is never perfectly.
Three lines fix it: trim, bleed and the safe zone.
Trim: where the card is cut
The trim line is the card's finished size. For a poker card, it's 63.5 × 88.9 mm. Everything you design is planned around it.
The problem is that no cut lands exactly on the trim line. A home trimmer drifts by a millimetre; a print shop's guillotine cutting through a stack of sheets can drift too. So you need a margin of error on both sides of the line.
Bleed: art past the edge
Bleed is extra artwork that runs past the trim line on every side. The standard is 3 mm (or ⅛ inch, which is 3.175 mm, in the US).
If the cut lands a little outside the trim line, it cuts through bleed, which is the same colour as the edge of the card. No white sliver. Without bleed, the same cut shows the white paper underneath.
So a poker card's artwork isn't 63.5 × 88.9 mm. With 3 mm of bleed on each side, it's 69.5 × 94.9 mm.
Safe zone: where text is safe
The safe zone is a margin inside the trim line, usually also 3 mm. If the cut lands a little inside the trim line, it cuts into the card, and anything in that margin may be trimmed off or end up uncomfortably close to the edge.
Keep everything that matters inside the safe zone: text, costs, icons, numbers. Only backgrounds and decoration should cross it.
The three lines together
For a poker card at 3 mm bleed and 3 mm safe zone:
| Line | Size |
|---|---|
| Artwork (with bleed) | 69.5 × 94.9 mm |
| Trim (finished card) | 63.5 × 88.9 mm |
| Safe zone | 57.5 × 82.9 mm |
The card size guide gives these three for every common card, token and board size, in millimetres, inches and pixels, with a blank template that shows the lines:
Card size guide and blank templates
Poker, bridge, tarot, mini, square and more card sizes, with tokens, hex tiles and game boards: trim, bleed and safe zone in mm, inches and pixels at 300 DPI, and a free blank template for each, as a PNG with guides or a printable PDF sheet.
In pixels
At 300 DPI, the usual print resolution, a poker card is 750 × 1050 px at trim, and 821 × 1121 px with a 3 mm bleed. If you make art in pixels, that's the canvas size. For any other size or DPI:
Print size calculator
Convert millimetres, inches and pixels at any DPI, see the image size a card needs with its bleed, and how many cards fit a sheet of Letter, A4 or A3. Free, in your browser, with no sign-up.
What about cut marks?
Cut marks are the short lines outside each card on a print sheet that show where the trim line is. They sit outside the bleed, so you can see them after printing and line your trimmer up with them. Always cut on the cut marks, never on the visible edge of the art.
What about rounded corners?
Rounded corners are cut after the straight cuts, with a corner punch. Keep the safe zone the same and nothing important will be near a corner.
Setting it up
In Decklab AI, every new component gets a 3 mm bleed and safe zone by default, and print-and-play PDFs include the bleed and cut marks. If you print through a manufacturer, check their template: some want a different bleed, and their numbers win.
If you have art without bleed, the print-and-play PDF maker can still lay it out with cut marks; just expect to cut carefully.
Print-and-play PDF maker
Turn your card images into a print-and-play PDF: pick the card size and paper, add cut marks and backs for double-sided or fold-and-glue printing, and set how many of each card. Free, in your browser, with no sign-up.
The short version
- Bleed: 3 mm of art past the edge. Prevents white slivers.
- Trim: the finished size. Cut on the marks.
- Safe zone: 3 mm inside the edge. Keeps text from being cut.
Set them up once in your template and you'll never think about them again.