Everything About Stickers: Part II: Guide To Buying Custom Stickers

Stickers come in all shapes and sizes from standard shapes such as squares, rectangles, ovals, circles and bursts. Custom cut shapes are called “die cut” stickers. This custom shape is usually achieved with a “die” that is not unlike a cookie cutter. These dies are expensive to make and usually stay with the printer. For this reason stick with the standard shapes and sizes offered by your printer to save lots of money. Printers offer lots of standard sizes, StickerGiant.com offers 51 standard shapes and sizes. The standard sizes can be printed much faster as well, dies can take a week or more to produce and really bog down the production time. Short run laser die cutting is available as well, but in quantities over 1000 the digital nature of this process becomes ridiculously uneconomical.

Most custom sticker printing companies can print 1, 2, or 3 spot colors. Spot color printing is by far the most popular and economical type of sticker printing for runs over 500 or so pieces. Most printers have standard ink colors to streamline the printing process to save time and money. When special colors are required it usually costs more and takes more time, so try to stick with a printer that offers lots of standard ink choices. Most printers also offer 4-color printing, which is called "process color"." This is the technique of using 4 colors to print color photographic content with 4 ink colors. The 4 colors used in process color are cyan, magenta, yellow and black, often referred to as CMYK. Not all stocks take all designs and inks well. The darker fluorescent stocks really only take black or dark blue as an ink color for contrast reasons. The inks used in most printing processes are translucent so when put on the clear stocks they can present design challenges. The inks take on a “stained glass” quality, so keep that in mind when designing for clear stocks.

Artwork preparation is where the knowledge you just gained hits the road, planning your artwork will enable you to finish this project quickly and inexpensively. If printing using non-digital methods (greater than 500 stickers) follow these four rules:

1. Check your printer’s artwork guidelines first. Create and save the artwork into a format your printer can use. Word and PowerPoint files are usually are not acceptable for artwork files. Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop are the two most common programs used to create sticker designs.
2. Use as few spot colors as possible and use standard ink colors.
3. Pick a standard size and shape, avoid die cut shapes.
4. Submit your artwork to the printer soon enough so that if there is a problem with the artwork you will still meet your deadline.

1. Again, checking the artwork guidelines first is the best start. Create and save the artwork into a format your printer can use.
2. Create your artwork at a resolution greater than 300 dpi.
3. Be sure to save your artwork into CMYK or RGB depending on the printer’s requirements. RGB is the most common color format for image manipulation. RGB stands for Red Green Blue. CMYK is a color format available in most full featured image manipulation software.