Bleed and safe margins for stickers
No cut lands exactly on the line, whether it's made by scissors, a craft knife or a machine. Bleed and a safe area make small misses invisible.
The three zones
- Cut line: where the sticker is meant to be cut. In Sticker Bench it's the width × height you enter, drawn as a rectangle, rounded rectangle or oval.
- Bleed: artwork that extends beyond the cut line. If the cut drifts outwards, you see more artwork instead of a white sliver of paper.
- Safe area: an inset inside the cut line. Keep text, faces and logos in it so a cut that drifts inwards doesn't clip them.
How much?
There's no universal number. Commercial printers often ask for bleed of about 3 mm (⅛ in), but use the specification your print shop gives you. For home printing and hand cutting, 1–2 mm of bleed and a 2–3 mm safe area are reasonable starting points. Make the safe area at least as large as the error you actually see when you cut a test sheet.
How Sticker Bench fills the bleed
Your artwork is never stretched. When bleed is above zero, the image is scaled up evenly until it covers the whole bleed area, then clipped there. A 2 mm bleed on a 50 mm sticker scales the art by about 8% (54 ÷ 50), so a little of the image's outer edge ends up past the cut line. If your file already has bleed built in, set bleed to 0 and size the sticker to the cut line.
Two neighbouring stickers can't both have bleed in the same gap, so the studio requires spacing ≥ 2 × bleed.
Transparent die-cut stickers
If your PNG has a transparent background and you plan to cut around the shape, bleed adds nothing, because there's no colour to extend. Use bleed 0 and an oval or rounded cut shape, or cut by hand along a white border you drew into the artwork.
Next: choosing spacing · DPI and resolution