Business card printed with white bleed showing

[tom95521]

Affinity designer 1.6.4.104. I am a novice. I created a custom document size for a business card 3.5" x 2" with .055" bleed. I added a 3.5" x 2" green rectangle for the background color of the card. When I did a PDF export with bleed there was a white border. I uploaded to vistaprint.com and the preview looked fine. When I received the order one or more of the sides had the white bleed showing. Vistaprint support was nice and filled in the bleed color to match the card background and will print again for free.

Question. How do I set background document color or is there a way to set the bleed color? Is the only way to fix this problem is to make the green rectangle larger than the document size?

Thanks,
Tom

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Tom.

13 minutes ago, tom95521 said:

Question. How do I set background document color or is there a way to set the bleed color? Is the only way to fix this problem is to make the green rectangle larger than the document size?

There’s no such thing as a bleed colour. You might have several elements of different colours, or even a multicoloured element, and the program would have no way of knowing which colour to use: you just need to extend any affected elements into the bleed area.

[tom95521]

That makes sense. I guess I assumed the bleed area would not show up when the card was printed so I didn't worry about color.

Thanks,
Tom

[MikeW]

Extending the page elements that go to the edge of the card through the bleed area allow for mis-cutting the cards. It is near impossible to cut just to the edge of cards (well, any printed material). So extending items through the bleed area ensure the color or images intended to not allow the paper color to show don't do so.

Mike