We've all been there. We've slaved away for hours creating a design masterpiece. Everything looks A-OK on screen. We press print and, after a bit of whurring and churning, our desktop printer spits out the fruits of our labour. Everything looks great... apart from an ugly white unprinted border around the edges of the sheet. Doh!

In this respect, commercial printing presses are no different to your desktop inkjet or laser printer - they cannot print to the very edge of a sheet of paper. To get around the problem, we print your design onto a larger sheet of paper and then cut it down to size. Easy! Well, not quite - there is an issue you need to be aware of.

Most conventional and digital printing presses suffer from slight sheet-to-sheet misregistration. In other words, due to slight movement as the paper passes through a press, your design may not be printed in exactly the same position on every sheet of paper. We're not talking about much - usually only fractions of a millimetre - but the accuracy differs from press to press and is usually more evident on digital presses.

That's not all. When the guillotine operator is trimming your design down to size, it would take someone with an incredible aim to cut exactly along the edge of your design. Any press misregistration would make this job impossible. So what does he do? If he cuts into the design there's a danger that text or graphics close to the edge of the sheet will be lost. Cut too little off and you'll end up with a white border on at least some of the prints.

To get around this problem, designers use bleed.