Print-ready artwork: DPI, bleed and safe margins

Artwork that looks sharp on screen is routinely too soft to print. A screen shows roughly 72–110 pixels per inch; a press wants 300. That gap is why an image that fills your monitor can come back from a print run looking muddy at postcard size. This guide covers the three specifications that decide whether a file prints well, and what to do when yours falls short.

Resolution: why 300 DPI

DPI only means something in combination with a physical size. "3000 pixels wide" is not a resolution — it's a resolution once you know how wide the printed piece is.

The arithmetic is simple: pixels ÷ inches = DPI.

Your image	Printed at	Effective DPI	Verdict
1500 × 2400 px	5 × 8 in	300	Print-ready
1000 × 1600 px	5 × 8 in	200	Visibly soft
600 × 960 px	5 × 8 in	120	Unusable
1500 × 2400 px	3 × 5 in	480	More than enough

The same file is excellent at one size and unusable at another. This is why the Studio checks resolution against the actual product dimensions as you place your artwork, rather than checking the file in isolation — and why it warns you before a file leaves the Studio rather than after a run has been printed.

To hit 300 DPI, multiply the printed size in inches by 300:

• 5 × 8 in notepad → 1500 × 2400 px
• 4 × 6 in notepad → 1200 × 1800 px
• 3 × 5 in pocket pad → 900 × 1500 px
• 3.5 × 2 in business card → 1050 × 600 px
• 8.5 × 11 in calendar → 2550 × 3300 px

Add bleed to those numbers if your artwork runs to the edge — see below.

Bleed: 0.125 inches beyond the trim

Paper moves. A guillotine cutting a stack of several hundred sheets will not land on precisely the same line every time, and the tolerance is somewhere around a thirty-second of an inch. If your background stops exactly at the trim line, a cut that drifts by a hair leaves a thin white sliver along one edge.

Bleed is the fix: extend the artwork 0.125 in past the trim on every side and let the cut fall inside it. The overhang is thrown away; the point is that it exists.

So a 5 × 8 in notepad with a full-bleed background is actually built at 5.25 × 8.25 in — 0.125 added to each of the four sides. At 300 DPI that's 1575 × 2475 px.

Artwork that doesn't reach the edge — a centred motif on a white page — doesn't need bleed at all. It only matters when colour or imagery is meant to run off the sheet.

Safe margins: keep content away from the cut

Bleed protects the edge of your artwork. A safe margin protects the middle of it.

The same cutting tolerance that can leave a white sliver can also shave off the outer edge of your design. Anything you'd hate to lose — text, logos, a border, a name — should sit at least 0.125 in inside the trim line, and a little more is better. Borders are the classic trap: a thin frame drawn right at the trim will look perfectly centred on screen and visibly lopsided on paper, because a drift of half a millimetre is invisible in open space and obvious against a straight line.

A practical way to think about the three zones:

• Bleed — 0.125 in outside the trim. Background only. Will be cut off.
• Trim — the finished size of the piece.
• Safe area — 0.125 in inside the trim. Everything that matters lives here.

What the Studio checks, and what it can't

The Studio checks your artwork's effective resolution against the product size as you place it, and it won't let a file through that can't be printed well at that size. That check is about pixel density.

It cannot tell you that your image is blurry. An out-of-focus photo upscaled to 1500 × 2400 px has a perfectly good DPI number and will print as a large, crisp rendering of a blurry photo. Nor can it know that the low-contrast grey you chose will disappear on kraft stock, or that your text is set at 4 pt. Resolution is necessary, not sufficient.

Fixing artwork that falls short

• Re-export from the original. If the artwork began life as a vector file — Illustrator, Affinity, Figma, Inkscape — export a fresh raster at the size you actually need. Vectors have no fixed resolution, so this costs nothing but a minute.
• Scan at a higher setting. Hand-painted or drawn originals should be scanned at 300 DPI or above, at their real size. Scanning small art at 300 and then enlarging it defeats the point.
• Use the artwork smaller. A file that fails at 5 × 8 in may be comfortably print-ready at 3 × 5 in. Changing the product size is often faster than remaking the art.
• Don't upscale and hope. Enlarging a small image invents pixels rather than recovering detail. It raises the DPI number and does nothing for the print.

What comes back to the seller

Once a buyer's order is approved, the seller downloads press-ready files: 300 DPI with 0.125 in bleed, trim marks, and letter-sheet layouts ready to go on press. The specification described in this guide is the same one those exports are built to.