Gutter Bleed Design

If spreads are very important to the overall look and feel of your book we recommend binding types that lay flat such as saddle stitched booklets spiral bound booklets or wire o booklets.

Gutter bleed design.

We touched on full bleed printing last week when we looked at making a print ready pdf. Today let s look a little deeper at this. A full bleed describes when a project has been designed with an image or images that touches the cut edge on all four sides. The example below shows the appropriate use of gutter for the text along the top left and bottom edges of the design.

This is a visual reference to stop you from crowding the finished edge the solid red line with text and any graphics that don t require bleed. I am deep into the design of a wiro bound reference book that is over 400 pages. Spreads can be very difficult to design for when producing perfect bound books or hard cover books due to the gutter. And for some book layouts properly applying bleed settings can be the difference between professional design and not.

Set the same bleed on all sides or click the chain icon to set different values for the top bottom inside and outside settings. The dotted green line represents gutter. They all have the same sets of master pages. For example you can type 0 125 in or 3 mm even if your document uses picas or something else.

I am creating it in sections to eventually gather the section files into an indesign book. Type a bleed value in any units. Scroll and then click bleed and slug to expand the panel.