Bleed & Crop Marks

The Bleed & Crop Marks section configures the exterior boundaries of your print document, a requirement for designs where background colors, photos, or textures extend completely to the edge of the physical paper.

Bleed Configuration

Bleed is the sacrificial extension of your artwork beyond the final trim line. Since commercial paper cutters have mechanical tolerances, printing artwork slightly oversized and trimming it down guarantees edge-to-edge coverage without unprinted white slivers showing.

Toggle the section on and enter your required values.

• Standard commercial bleed in the US is 0.125 inches.
• Standard commercial bleed globally is 3 mm. Values can be linked for uniform bleed or unlinked for asymmetric bleed.

Bleed Modes

Print for Figma offers two calculation methodologies for how bleed affects your Figma frame:

• Expand (Recommended): The bleed value is added to the outside of your target layout dimensions. Your intended design area remains true to size, but the total Figma frame grows larger to hold the bleed artwork.
• Contain: The bleed value is subtracted from the inside of your target dimensions. The overall Figma frame remains locked to your specified size, meaning your usable, final print area is reduced.

Crop Marks

Crop marks (or trim marks) are intersecting hairlines placed outside the artwork boundaries to instruct the printer exactly where the final cuts should be made.

Only enable crop marks if your specific print vendor requests them; many automated web-to-print systems prefer clean PDFs without visible marks.

If required, toggle Crop Marks to Enabled and configure the visual parameters:

• Weight: The stroke thickness of the mark lines (typically 0.25 or 0.5 pt).
• Offset: The gap distance between the final trim line and the start of the crop mark. This value should be equal to or greater than your bleed amount, so the marks do not print onto the final artwork.
• Length: The physical length of the mark lines (e.g., 0.125 inches or 3 mm).

When the layout is generated, Print for Figma places the crop marks precisely at the trim boundaries of your document.