Cutting cards
Winkletter • 6 May 2025 •
We all need a little wiggle room. Continuing my recent pattern of explaining whatever I happen to be working on, I’ll explain the important dimensions for printing cards. Basically, because a printed sheet might be a bit off center, you need to account for the possibility that the trimmed edge will run into what’s called the bleed zone.
- Bleed Zone: You want to extend your design into this area in case the card edge strays into this area.
- Trim Line: The size of the card. Ideally this is centered, but will usually be a bit off.
- Safe Zone: You can expect anything in this area to print on the finished card.
- Border Area: You don’t want to have the border too close to the edge, so you actually want to pull back a bit from the safe zone.
Right now I’m working on designing a US standard poker-sized deck of cards which are 2.5 x 3.5 inches and will be printed at 300 dpi.
| Zone | Inches | Pixels | Aspect Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bleed Zone | 2.75 × 3.75 | 825 × 1125 | 11:15 |
| Trim Line | 2.5 × 3.5 | 750 × 1050 | 5:7 |
| Safe Zone | 2.25 × 3.25 | 675 × 975 | 9:13 |
| Border Area | 2 × 3 | 600 × 900 | 2:3 |
So when I’m generating my background texture, I’ll want to use an aspect ratio of 11:15 (or 3:4 if I can’t specify that size). But the illustrations I drop in won’t need to be larger than 600 x 900 pixels–although I’ll probably generate them larger and resize down.