If you want to submit badge artwork:
The badge itself is 4x3. Artwork needs to be 4" wide and 2" tall, with an additional 1/4" on the left, top, and right. 200DPI is good. Please submit a full-color (24-bit) sRGB PNG file.
The additional “bleed” area gets cut off, but the cutting is imprecise, so do extend background fills/textures into it and do not put important details in it or too close to it.
If you’re using Photoshop, download this PSD template.
The template is also available as a layered TIFF. There are three layers. (If you don’t see three layers, the program you are using is bad. As a work-around, you can load this as a second layer to see where things get cut off.)
What it should look like
- Important details mostly kept away from the bleed area.
- Background fills and basic color blocking continued into the bleed area.
- Shapes continued into the bleed area, not cut off.
Note that the exact positioning of the sun/rays in this example is a bit awkward. You should use the preview layer to get a feel for what it’ll look like when the badge is cut out correctly, and tweak things so that they look best when that is the case.
A second example
This example is to illustrate that inking and shading should be continued (at least minimally) into the bleed area:
What it should NOT look like
Don’t put important details in the bleed area
(Pretend that the arm-ish blob is well-drawn and important to the art.)
Don’t flatten the black preview border into the file you submit
(Just discard or hide that layer.)
Don’t crop out the bleed area in the file you submit
Don’t cut off inking or shading at the bleed line
When you look at the full image with guides turned off, the transition to the bleed area shouldn’t be blatant. It’s perfectly okay for the shading/coloring in the bleed area to be really low-effort and sloppy, but there should not be an obvious demarcation where the color/inking/etc stops abruptly.
(Pretend that the squiggles in the blue are shaded water.)
The point of all this
The point of having a bleed area is so that when the badges get mis-aligned and are cut at some offset from where the cuts are ideally supposed to be, the badges still look sort of decent, like these examples:
