Expert: Nick Putthoff - 2/15/2008

Question
Is it standard practice to place crop marks and bleed outside the artboard or inside. In short by artboard is Adobe actually talking about the "Live Area" or "Printable area"-which I assume must include Bleed and Crop Marks. Even Ill CS3 does not have a dialogue box for bleed until you export a .pdf.  What do most printers want or designers do for this. If we follow the example in InDesign we see all bleed and an assumed crop area for the artboard.

Answer
Russell,
I would follow the example of InDesign where the artboard defines the edge of your printed piece. Anything beyond the artboard is bleed.
You could use the Crop Area command at The Object pull-down menu. If you  do not have an object selected when you choose this command the crop marks will further display your desired trim area. I believe this would be a preferred method for printers that will impose your artwork multiple times on a single sheet using their own software.
Many designers will use a large artboard area and define a smaller area with crop marks either drawn with the pen tool or creates with the trim marks filter (Filter pull-down menu/Create/Trim Marks). Trim marks created in this fashion can be easily moved to accommodate various amounts of bleed.

Good Luck

Nick