Put at its most rudimentary, bleed is the area of your print job which will get cut off leaving you with image right at the edge of the finished product. It's a safety thing. Without bleed there's the risk of showing some blank white at the edge of the job where there should be print. For this explanation, I'm going to use a business card as an example.
'Printing isn't an exact science' is a statement I often repeat to clients. When ink is put to paper, whether its from a massive printing press or a small inkjet printer, there may be some movement in the machine. When a business card is cut down to its finished size, there needs to a small amount of leeway to allow for these errors and slight movements.
Bring on the concept of bleed.
The example below shows how the thought process of a printing job should begin. The red area is the area which will be cut off; the white area shows the cutting edge and the light green area is the safe area. Of course, you won't see any of these colours in your document; this is purely for clarification.
When creating a business card of say 85x55mm, we need to create our artwork slightly larger. Most modern applications allow you to do this when you set up a document. InDesign shows a section in the document setup detailing bleed area. Check with your printer. However, the standard is around 3mm extra all round.
When the document is printed we should see that the print extends beyond the crop marks.
A typical print may look something like this:
So when we cut it we end up with a nice business card printed right to the edge.
This process is used for leaflets, booklets, and any printed job with printing right to the edge.
Hope this has made some sense.
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