 Borderless tricks We’ve talked a lot about borderless invitation designs, but this is our first foray into bringing borderless designs to the envelope. With a few sly tricks, you can fool your desktop ink jet printer into printing all the way to the edge of your envelopes or cards that are not standard photo sizes. This technique won’t let you achieve full bleed on all edges, but you can create designs that include elements that run off the top and left edges.
First keep the limitations in mind when creating your design. Since you’re fooling the printer into thinking it’s printing onto a standard photo size, you’ll only have access to borderless design on two edges: the edges that are top and left when you feed your stationery into the printer (see image below). You can adjust your design or the way that you feed your stationery into your printer to change which two edges, but you will never get more than two.
In our example, we’ve created an envelope with the return address in the bottom left corner of the back of the envelope. We added an image that bleeds off of the edge of the envelope. When you create your design, make sure that you only have the borderless elements running off of two edges, and make sure that the two edges are adjacent.

In order to get the stem of the flower onto the top or left edge, we need to get the bottom of the envelope into the top or left position as shown in the diagrams above. So we’re going to print the Reply envelopes using the one-pass envelope printing feature so that we feed the envelope bottom-first into our printer. From the printer’s perspective, the first edge to feed in is the “top” so in this case the bottom of our envelope becomes the top of the printout when the one-pass envelope feature rotates the printout.
When printing your design, choose the borderless size that is large enough to fit the width of the stationery. Since our 4-Bar envelope measures 5.125 x 3.625 inches, it will not fit within the 3.5 x 5 or 4 x 6 borderless sizes. We used the 5 x 7 borderless size to print our envelope, and made sure to set the Borderless Expansion to Min to preserve our design.
As always, we recommend that you do test prints using plain paper cut to the size of your stationery before printing onto expensive stock. We also recommend that you review our Demystifying Desktop Printing article for more advanced printing tips.
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