About this tool
Generate a press-ready business card template with bleed, trim, safe zone and crop marks, sized in real millimetres.
The Business Card Bleed Template builds a press-ready business card template as a true-size SVG, drawing the three boxes a printer expects: the bleed box (trim + 2 × bleed), the magenta trim line where the guillotine cuts, and a dashed cyan safe box (trim − 2 × safe margin) that type must stay inside. Crop marks are placed outside the bleed box rather than over the artwork, which is what PDF/X requires, and the file is written with physical units (width="101mm", 1 SVG unit = 1 mm) so it opens at real size in Illustrator, Affinity Designer or Inkscape. It is for anyone laying out a card for an actual print run instead of guessing margins in a screen-pixel document.
Open Business Card Bleed Template on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter Card width and Card height — 90 and 54 by default — plus Bleed each side, and set Unit to mm or inches.
The template rebuilds on every keystroke; press Reset to return to a 90 × 54 card with 3 mm bleed.
Read Business card template for the Trim size, Artwork size and Safe text area inset with its layer checklist, then press Copy output.
Presets cover Europe/India/UK 85 × 55 mm, US 3.5 × 2 in, ISO 7810 ID-1 85.6 × 53.98 mm, Japan 91 × 55 mm, Australia/NZ 90 × 55 mm, square 55 × 55 mm and slim 85 × 40 mm.
Trim, bleed, safe and canvas are each reported in millimetres, inches, PostScript points and pixels at your chosen DPI, so the same template works whoever you hand it to.
It warns on zero bleed, on a safe margin under 3 mm, and on any resolution below the 300 DPI normally specified for cards — before the job goes to press.
3 mm per edge is the ISO/European standard and 1/8 inch (3.175 mm) is the North American equivalent; 5 mm is used for thick or textured stock. Bleed is added on every side, so an 85 × 55 mm card with 3 mm bleed produces a 91 × 61 mm artwork box.
Trim is the finished card size where the blade cuts, bleed is the extra artwork outside it that absorbs cutting drift, and the safe area is the inset where text must stay. This template defaults to a 4 mm safe margin rather than 3 mm because a guillotine cutting a stack of card stock wanders more than it does on a single sheet.
The tool computes floor(sheet width ÷ box width) × floor(sheet height ÷ box height) and tries both rotations, keeping the better one. A standard 85 × 55 mm card with 3 mm bleed makes a 91 × 61 mm box, which gangs 9-up on A4 when rotated — versus only 8 upright. A4, A3, SRA3 and US Letter are all available as parent sheets.
Because marks printed over live artwork make a file fail PDF/X preflight. Here each mark starts at the bleed edge and runs outward for the crop-mark length — 5 mm by default, the usual imposition setting — and all guides are drawn as 0.2 mm hairlines (about 0.57 pt) so they never fatten the layout.