I Aint Got Time to Bleed!

After many years in the trenches of this crazy business I'm still floored by the number of times I come across a fellow designer's project for print, be it an ad, a catalog or a brochure, with no bleeds! I'm not talking about the red, salty stuff that vampires crave. I'm referring to the additional surface of an image that needs to spill beyond the live area of a document in order to achieve a clean edge after the printer has trimmed the document to size. And for any of you still wondering what the hell I'm talking about (I probably had the misfortune to come across one of your files), imagine painting a green wall pink, but not painting all the way to the edges. You'd still see that green border all around your pretty pink wall wouldn't you? So, from now on add bleeds damn it!