Artwork Guidelines

Adobe Indesign is a page layout application which is perfect for designing label. This is our favourite application for designing as you can manage all content easily.

1. Setup

Create a new file, ensure you set it up as actual size. During the file setup you can add your bleed, we recommend 2mm minimum. You can also add inner safe margins, we recommend 2mm margins and keep all artwork inside them.

2. Design

When designing your document, ensure all important elements are kept within the 2mm margin guide that you have set in the last step. Anything that bleeds off the page needs to extend out to the red bleed margin. Ensure all elements are clear. We recommend minimum font sizes of 4pt. If you inport images, ensure they are not pixilated.

3. Saving

Save your Indesign document somewhere safe for later use, this is your editable file. Now export it as a PDF for print. You will need to choose the PDF settings from your menu when exporting. Use a high quality setting. Ensure you look through the PDF export options and include your bleed and also trim marks.

If you have a background colour or have elemnts going off the edge of the label, you require bleed.

Bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the label before trimming. The bleed is the area to be trimmed off and it should not contain any parts that you want to appear on your labels. The bleed is the part on each side of a label that gives us a small amount of space to account for movement of the press and the cutting dies.

Artwork and background colours can extend into the bleed area. After the labels are trimmed, the bleed ensures that no unprinted edges occur in the final trimmed label.

It is very difficult to print exactly to the edge of a label so, to achieve this, it is necessary to print a slightly larger area than is needed and then trim the labels down to the required finished size and shape.

Images, background images and fills which are intended to extend to the edge of the label must be extended beyond the trimming line to give a bleed.

Unlike many online printing companies we have catered for bleed within our online designer. The area in-between the black and red lines on the design stage is the bleed area. You will see a fully cropped print preview on submission of artwork.

We ask that you supply all artwork with a 2mm bleed on each edge, this gives enough tolerance for any movement in the press, paper or cutter.

Your documents will be printed using a CMYK printing process. This stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Key, the Key being the Black. These four colours combine together to make up every colour that you see in your artwork when printed.

This process differs to how you see colours on the screen as those colours are made up from RGB. RGB stands for Red, Green & Blue. RGB is unlike CMYK as it’s made up from light rather than ink or coloured toner. This enables RGB colour to be more vibrant and appear more colourful.

RGB light, when combined together can create more vibrant colours than that of CMYK. This is because RGB light has a wider colour gamut than that of the CMYK Inks / Toners. There is a part of both the RGB and CMYK colour gamuts that overlap, meaning that a large part of each can be matched from screen to print.

For the parts where they do not overlap, this is where conversion comes in play. If you supply us with a file made up of RGB colours, we’ll need to convert it to CMYK colour for printing. If there are any colours in your RGB file that appear outside of the CMYK colour gamut, they will be converted to the nearest achievable colour in the CMYK gamut. This is done automatically by our dedicated software for the closest match.

To see for yourself the differences between RGB and CMYK colours when printing stickers, you can use the RGB to CMYK conversion tool.

Let’s be honest, what you see is not always what you will get….
We’ll explain why!

Lets start with monitors…

The monitors in our offices are 27″ and at a 5K resolution, each one run under daylight bulbs to avoid any miss-calibration. They cost over £1500 each and we have one for each user, calibrated weekly by spectrophotometer.

Don’t worry, we’re not boasting, we’re telling you because it would be unlikely that you have the same hi-end production setup in your home office, with the same level of calibration.

Lets face it, most people have a monitor/tablet/phone that they will approve their proofs on. Just so we’re clear, the majority of these devices have never been calibrated professionally and will not give accurate colour, just a representation at best.

So what can we do?

Apart from you driving/flying/train’ing to our office to see the run on the press there isn’t an awful lot we can do.

The accuracy level of the print industry cannot be translated across the web from screen to screen, printer to printer. Anyone who tells you different is lying.

All we can do is give you the best chance of getting artwork similar to your screen. In order for this to happen, you need to follow our artwork guidelines. Following these will give you the very best chance of getting accuracy across the web, from screen to print.

The best colour matching system used by printers & designers worldwide

We only match to Pantone colours. Please don’t ask us to match your curtains, your lipstick or anything other than a Pantone swatch colour.

Keep your important elements safe.

We’re not going to tell you how to design your labels, but we would suggest to take note of the items on this page to get best results. Take a look at the examples on this page, we’ll let you make your own mind up whether or not to add items close to the edge of the label.

If we were able to perfectly print any design we would obviously do that, unfortunately manufacturer tolerances don’t allow us to do so.

If you are ordering clear/frosted labels from us, you might need to setup a white ink layer.

Our CMYK inks when printed are slightly translucent, this is fine when sticking your clear stickers onto light coloured surfaces but it’s a problem for dark surfaces. Light surfaces act just as a sheet of paper does, creating contrast to the colours and helping them stand out.

Dark surfaces don’t do this, they absorb the colours into them making them difficult to see due to lack of contrast. Please see image examples.

White Spot Channel Setup

Whatever application you are working in, you will need an application that supports spot colours. Vector applications are the most popular, such as Adobe illustrator & Corel Draw. You cannot setup your artwork for white ink printing in Photoshop without being a guru in it. No matter what application you use, you will need to follow a few rules to get the intended results.

• – Avoid using transparency
• – Flatten your artwork
• – White ink cannot be overlaid, it needs to be the bottom layer.

Instructions

If you have white ink beneath some elements but you require white ink on top of some elements too, you will essentially need to produce some complex artwork. Work with 2 layers, bottom one being the white ink layer only and the layer above for your CMYK artwork. Your task will be to get your artwork looking exactly as you want printed without putting any white ink onto the CMYK artwork layer. This involves punching out elements on the CMYK artwork layer so the white beneath shines up through. Failure to do this will produced mixed and unpredictable results. It’s your responsibility to ensure your artwork is setup as per this guide as it might not necessarily show up on your proof. Please use the spot colour setting in the image provided.