My panels line up with Live/Safe area margins, is that okay?

[marygold]

I have familiarized myself with keeping track of Bleed and Trim areas, and how all the important content like panels and dialogue must be kept within the Live or “Safe” area.

I have been drawing my comic panels to line up exactly with the borders of the Live are. Is that a good decision? I’m worried that should I ever print the pages, the space between the edge of the paper and the panels will be too small. I have a 1” Trim area and a 1/2” Bleed area (Also are those dimensions for the Trim and Bleed good?)

Thanks in advance!

[keii4ii]

I did that once. Viewing the printed book resulting from it was... a mildly suffocating experience. So I don't recommend doing it. Put a little space between your safe area boundaries and your panel borders.

However, 1" trim area is really big! Every printer I have looked into have it smaller than that. So taking that into the equation, you're probably gonna be safe. :'D

Buuuut if you really want to be sure, you want to talk to the specific printer you're going to use, and ask about their trim/bleed specifics.

[punkarsenic]

imo the safe area only needs to be vaguely paid attention to for the side thatll be on the inside of the book - thats where, especially in perfect bind, youll lose some space to the fold. and even then, i just printed a book where i kept that side in the safe zone and theres a big ol space (though it was saddle bound)

1/2" bleed feels pretty big to me? my bleed is 5mm / half a centimetre, which is roughly half that. not sure what you mean by a 1" trim area?

[marygold]

Thanks, this really helps! I guess with a 1” Trim it’ll be like I have a smaller Trim and left some space for the panels anyways.

Printing my pages is a dream a ways down the road, so for now I’ll just play it safe :’D

[marygold]

That’s a good thing to keep in mind, thanks!

I have been considering cutting the bleed to just a quarter of an inch, it’s time to reformat my documents! The Trim area is the space between the Bleed area and the Live area. It’s like an extra safety layer. I have a link to Kablam that explains it way better than I do:

[qwerty]

I'm not an expert, but from what I remember, the safe area and bleed area shouldn't need to be more than 1/4" inside / outside the trim line. The reason these margins are needed is just because the machine that cuts the printed paper has limited precision, so if the machine's margin of error is, say, 1/8", then the safe and bleed areas need to be 1/8" away from the trim line.

An exception would be if you are drawing on a large paper (e.g. 11x17) and then shrinking the document before printing. In that case, the safe and bleed areas need to be wider according to how much you shrink the page (e.g., if you will shrink the page by 50%, the margins would need to be twice as big).

As for panel borders being aligned with the safe area or not, it's personal preference but I definitely prefer to have them inside the safe area, for two reasons -
1. It's more aesthetically pleasing to have a good amount of white space around the edges of the page,
2. The composition / layout of the page itself can assume a greater variety of interesting shapes because bleed panels stick out farther compared to non-bleed panels.

[marygold]

Thanks for the explanation and the diagram! I’ll move my panels more inward.

[marygold]

@keii4ii If I may trouble you with another quick question, if say someone wants to print a book that is 8.5x11” (for example), would 8.5x11 be the size of the Safe area or the entire document (including the bleed)? Thank you!

[keii4ii]

The entire image would be bigger than the size of the book. It will depend on the printer, but going by average, it will be something like 9"x11.5". (Definitely look into your printer's specifics.)

The safe area, on the other hand, will be smaller than 8.5"x11".

[marygold]

Thank you so much! So the size of the Trim area will be the size of the final printed book. I suppose I should have figured that out just from the name!

[punkarsenic]

ahhh, i never had a name for the trim area. mine is hella wide bc i go with clip studio defaults

[Cavechan]

Agree with a lot that's been said here. It's definitely most important to consider the binding and for the binding you definitely want to go for that extra large safe zone. I've seen plenty of manga where the word bubbles/art goes into the binding and it looks bad. I've seen manga artists not completely adhere to the full safe zone though and they will go outside of it with their word bubbles for sure. It's one of those things that comes down to personal preference. Like if you look at the Boruto manga, the artist keeps everything within the safe zone.

Personally for me, I keep all panels lined up to it and all word bubbles within the safe zone but still bleed out as needed. So pages end up looking like this:

It's the same format on every, single page which is definitely optimal since consistency between pages is hugely important.