Guidelines / bleed / areas outside of bleed

[Anne]

I'm still confused about safe areas and guidelines.
Some products have a HUGE area around what I assume to be the safe area. Like 80% of the design space is bleed?

If I set the image to Fill the entire square which is now dark grey is filled.
The green dotted area is marking the safe area and I am assuming the area that shows the outline of the product is the boundary of what will be shown in the final product?
So what is the dark grey are for? Is it basically garbage and making it more difficult to fit a design properly?

And what is the lighter grey area for?

I basically need to know 2 things when creating something (should be simple):
- what is the safe area, which will always be printed
- what is the outer boundary, which shows what will NOT be printed (basically this is what the design tool should not show at all. This boundary needs to make sure no areas are left without print (creating ugly white stripes for instance).

In business cards it is also a drama, most of what should be the design area seems to be "bleed/garbage".
Why is there even an area that seems to be outside of the bleed?
I am going by what I see in the product preview now. If it looks OK there, I am assuming the customer does not get a flawed product. But maybe that is not always the case, as there is oftentimes a huge discrepancy between the design tool and the final product view?

Thank you for your insights!

[Jadendreamer13 · Accepted solution]

The lighter grey areas are where the design will be printing on the sides, top, and bottom of the phone case, so your design needs to extend slightly past the light grey area. The dark grey area just shows Zazzle’s artboard, though that’s probably not necessary. I like how the new design area shows where the cut-outs are for the camera and other elements. That seems to be new, and helpful.

[Anne]

Thanks so much for your quick reply and clear explanation, @Jadendreamer13 
So it seems then that the "fill" function is not working as it should.

[ColsCreations]

I agree that this new representation of guidelines is very confusing. 

This product example happens to be a Zippo. Here, I have "show bleed mask" UNchecked. You can see the dotted green line for safe-area and the solid gray line (used to be blue) that defines the sketchy "print" area between bleed and safe. But there is no dotted gray line showing where the bleed actually extends to. 

If you turn on the 'show bleed mask' there is still nothing showing where the bleed line is. The entire square background "canvas" we see in the design tool just turns dark gray. 

If you select "Fit" for your image it makes it so all four sides fit within the "print" area as represented by the solid gray line. 

I think that is weird. Fit should fit it to the green safe area to you know, be safe. 😉 The designer can then choose to enlarge it into the sketchy print area if they want to. 

But if you select Fill, it enlarges the image to fit the entire square background canvas we see and there is still no guideline showing where the bleed line is. 

Whether there's the dotted gray line for bleed showing or not seems to vary with products, but for those without it it seems to consider the whole square canvas as the bleed area. I think it's pretty confusing.

[Jadendreamer13]

There some things (and processes) that were working fine as is, and didn’t need improvement. This area is one of them. At the very least, all products should display the same bleed lines. This change has caused unnecessary confusion.

[ColsCreations]

Yes, and it's complicated by the fact they chose dotted gray and solid gray to represent the print and bleed lines, but made the "bleed mask" if you turn it on,  gray, too. 😜 Like how are you supposed to see the lines even when they are included?