Let's assume we would like to have card deck with such a beautifull verso design.We would like to have our card 58 mm by 88 mm and we want to have our design covering whole card, without any frame.
Single card seems to be OK, but consider situation we have printed it on spread sheet.
On printing spread we have cards imposed in a way we can press the whole deck on one sheet of cardboard.
So they look like that:
After pressing it is time to cut the spread into single cards. The process look like that:
Well, the problem is, it is just impossible to point the cutting knife exactly into that "line" where cards edges meets on cardboard - simply because this line has 0 mm width - in other words phisically doesn't exist.
So that would result in a such effect: (I am much exaggerating here to make it better visible...)
So the only solution is to make the bigger card - add extra space about 3 mm per all sides, so whole card is 64 mm width by 94 mm height (3 mm for left side plus 3 mm for right side makes 6 mm plus 58 mm of our card width makes 64 mm):
Then such a bigger cards spread we can cut with our knifes, and small imperfections with pointing the cutting knife at our "virtual" border between cards do not bother us because after butt-cutnig we got cards 64 mm by 94 mm then we cut them into desired 58 mm by 88 mm size by die-cut, which is cutting them with special casette (matrix), so that all imperfections of butt-cutting...
...are placed on waiste, and we have our card cut without any imperfections.
Die-cut has also some disadventages - one, and I think the most imporatant, is it's much more expensive then butt-cut.
The other is it takes much more time. First because the whole cutting process is longer (it consist of two stages and it's more complicated) , second because preparing cutting matrix takes a lot of time.
Of course die-cut is not always necessary - if we have design with sides of design symmetric (so that lef side fits right side) there is no need to die-cut, like below:
The other possibility (most common used) is to place monochromatic frame (most used is white but that is not a rule) around a design:
It's worth of considering and beeing aware of the way the card will be cut, on a designing stage.
Preparing cards for die-cutt requires 3 mm bleed (spare margin).
