How to use the size reference
- Find your product in the table under the preview. Use the chips to show only Business cards, Flyers & postcards or Posters, and the region menu to narrow it to US & Canada, Europe & ISO, Japan & China or Australia & NZ.
- Click a row. The name, the trim size in inches and millimeters, the size with bleed, the safe area and the pixel dimensions appear at the top, with a scaled preview: the red band is bleed, the solid line is the trim, the dashed blue line is the safe zone.
- Match your printer’s specs. Change Resolution (150, 300 or 600 DPI), Bleed and Safe zone. “Auto” uses 3 mm for metric sizes and ⅛ inch for inch sizes, which is what most printers ask for. Use ⇄ Rotate for a landscape poster or a portrait business card.
- Need something else? Open Custom size, type a width and height in inches, millimeters or centimeters, and press Use size.
- Download the template. Download PNG template gives a transparent image at the exact pixel size with the guides drawn in; place it on the top layer in Procreate or Photoshop. Download SVG template gives a vector version that opens at the physical size in Illustrator, Affinity or Inkscape. Copy sizes puts all the numbers on your clipboard for an email to the print shop.
Why bleed and safe zones exist
Printers don’t print business cards one at a time. They print a large sheet with many copies, then cut it down with a guillotine or a die. Even a well-maintained cutter can drift a little from sheet to sheet, so the blade never lands exactly on the line in your file.
Bleed protects the outside edge. If your background color or photo stops exactly at the trim line, a cut that lands slightly outside it leaves a hairline of white paper. Extending the artwork past the trim — 3 mm in most of the world, ⅛ inch (3.175 mm) in the US — means the blade always cuts through ink.
The safe zone protects the inside. Anything important — text, a logo, a QR code — stays at least the same distance inside the trim, so a cut that lands slightly inward doesn’t clip it. Borders are the classic trap: a thin frame 2 mm from the edge will look visibly uneven after trimming, so either push it well inside the safe zone or let it run off the edge into the bleed.
The two standards are close but not identical: ⅛ inch is 0.175 mm more than 3 mm. At 300 DPI that’s 37.5 px against 35.43 px, so a US file and a European file with the “same” bleed are not the same pixel size.
Pixel math, worked through
Every pixel number in the table comes from one formula:
pixels = millimeters ÷ 25.4 × DPI (or simply inches × DPI)
Take a European business card, 85 × 55 mm, at 300 DPI. 85 ÷ 25.4 × 300 = 1003.94, and 55 ÷ 25.4 × 300 = 649.61, so the canvas is 1004 × 650 px after rounding to whole pixels. Add 3 mm of bleed on each side and the card becomes 91 × 61 mm, which works out to 1074.80 × 720.47 — 1075 × 720 px. Notice that the bleed version isn’t simply 1004 + 2 × 35 px; round once from the final size, not in steps.
Inch sizes are tidier. A US card at 3.5 × 2 in is exactly 1050 × 600 px at 300 DPI, and with ⅛ inch of bleed it becomes 3.75 × 2.25 in, or 1125 × 675 px.
Posters get big fast. An A0 poster at 300 DPI is 9933 × 14043 px — about 139.5 million pixels — which is more than most phones and many laptops can comfortably edit. Large posters are viewed from a few steps away, so printers commonly accept 150 DPI files for them; check the table at 150 DPI before you set up a huge canvas. If you are working from an existing image, the DPI & Print Size Calculator tells you how large it can print.
Similar sizes are not interchangeable
A US business card (3.5 × 2 in, 88.9 × 50.8 mm) and a European one (85 × 55 mm) look almost the same on a screen, but the European card is 3.9 mm narrower and 4.2 mm taller. Their proportions differ — 1.75 : 1 against about 1.55 : 1 — so a layout can’t simply be scaled from one to the other without either cropping or empty bands. The same is true of A4 against US Letter and A3 against Tabloid. Set up the file for the country where it will be printed.
The A sizes, by contrast, all share one shape. Each sheet has sides in the ratio 1 : √2 (about 1 : 1.414), so cutting one in half produces the next size down with the same proportions. A0 is defined as one square meter (841 × 1189 mm), A1 is half of that, and so on down to A4 and A6. A layout designed for A4 scales to A3 or A5 without changes, which is why European printers use A sizes for nearly everything. For the full A, B and US series, see the Paper Size Chart.
Tips from practice
Ask for the printer’s template anyway. Most online printers publish their own bleed and safe-zone requirements, and some use 2 mm or 5 mm instead of the usual 3 mm. Match their numbers with the Bleed and Safe zone menus, then compare your file with their template before ordering.
Keep text off the safe line, not on it. The safe zone is the minimum. On business cards, give text a few extra millimeters of breathing room so the layout looks balanced even after a slightly off-center cut.
Name files with the trim size. “card-85x55-bleed3.pdf” saves a back-and-forth with the print shop and makes it obvious when someone has sent the US version to a European printer.
Export at the final size. Upscaling a 1000 px wide logo to fill an 18 × 24 in poster at 300 DPI (5400 × 7200 px) won’t add detail. Build the artwork at the size shown in the table from the start.