What is a safety margin in artwork?
The safety margin is a band just inside the trim line where nothing important may sit. Text, logos and anything that would look wrong clipped are kept inside it, so that normal cutting variation never takes a bite out of them.
It is the mirror image of bleed. Bleed extends artwork outside the trim so a cut landing slightly wide still hits ink; the safety margin holds content away from the trim so a cut landing slightly narrow still misses the type. Both exist because the same thing is true: the knife position varies a little.
On flat work a safety margin of around 3 mm to 5 mm inside the trim is usual, and more is better if the design allows it — type sitting 2 mm from the edge looks tight even when it is cut perfectly. On packaging the margin has to be more generous still, and it has to account for creases as well as cuts, because text that crosses a fold is distorted by it whether or not it was ever at risk of being trimmed.
The corners of a carton are the place this most often goes wrong. A panel looks like it has plenty of room in the flat artwork, but once the box is glued and erected the corner radius, the crease and the tolerance stack all take space from the same area. Anything critical — a barcode, a batch code panel, a regulatory statement — belongs well inside.
Prepress checks the margin as part of preflight, but it is cheaper to build it into the design than to be told at proofing that a line of type has to move.
Related
Terms that go with this one
- Bleed Bleed is artwork deliberately extended past the line where the paper will be cut — normally by 3 mm on… Read more about Bleed
- Crease A crease is a line pressed into board by a rounded steel rule so that it folds in a controlled… Read more about Crease
- Dieline A dieline is the flat engineering drawing of a package — every line the knife cuts, every line the board… Read more about Dieline
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