Artwork guidelines
Send us your design and the size you want. Print preparation is our job, not yours.
The short version: send us the best-quality file you have, tell us the finished size in inches, and outline your fonts. We do the rest of the print preparation.
What to send
| Verdict | Format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Best | PDF, AI, EPS, SVG | Vector. It scales to any size with no loss, and it gives us clean edges to build the cut path from. If your designer sent you one of these, send us that file rather than a screenshot of it. |
| Fine | PNG, TIFF | Raster, but good raster: 300 DPI at the finished size, with a transparent background. A 300 DPI file is not automatically enough — it has to be 300 DPI at the size you are printing, so a 3″ sticker wants about 900 pixels across. |
| Accepted, with a warning | JPEG | We will take it and we will print it, but JPEG has no transparency, so a die cut has nothing but the rectangle to follow, and its compression leaves halos around hard edges that are invisible on screen and obvious at print size. |
Whatever you send, files up to 150 MB go straight through the uploader. If yours is larger, TODO add the route for oversize files — a file transfer link, or an address to email
What you do not need to do
Most sticker printers hand you a setup guide. We do this part ourselves, so please do not spend an evening on any of it:
- Setting up an artboard at the right size
- Drawing a cut line, or naming a
CutContourspot colour - Adding bleed
- Adding registration or crop marks
- Converting to CMYK
- Adding a white underbase for clear stock
All of that is production work and we build it from your artwork. If you have already done it, that is fine too — send it as-is and we will work with what is there.
What we do need
- Fonts converted to outlines (Type → Create Outlines in Illustrator, or export a PDF with fonts embedded). We will not have your font installed, and a substituted font is the single most common reason a proof comes back wrong.
- The finished size, in inches. You set this on the order form. We size the artwork to it — we do not guess it from the file.
- A transparent background for die-cut stickers, if you are sending a PNG or TIFF. The cut follows the outline of the artwork, and on a fully opaque file the only outline available is the rectangle.
- Every layer you want printed. Hidden layers stay hidden.
Size and resolution
Nothing wider than 52″. That is the printable width across our roll and it is a hard limit — the press physically cannot lay ink past it. Length is not the same constraint: it runs down the roll, so a long, narrow sticker is fine.
The order form will not let you enter a width past the limit for the material you have selected, so you cannot order something we cannot print.
Colour
Send it in whatever colour space you have. Screens are RGB and presses are CMYK, so some colours shift a little in the conversion — usually the very bright saturated blues, greens and oranges, which a screen can show and ink cannot quite reach. We flag it on the proof when it is noticeable.
If you are matching a brand colour, say so when you order and give us the reference (a Pantone number, or a CMYK breakdown). TODO state whether the shop will do a printed colour draw-down for brand matching, and what it costs
Common problems, and what happens
My file is low resolution.
Nothing is rejected for it. We flag anything under about 300 DPI at your ordered size and tell you what it will look like; often we can redraw a simple logo as vector. You see the result on the proof before it prints.
The artwork is a different shape from the size I ordered.
We tell you. A 2″ × 4″ artwork in a 3″ × 3″ order has to be either cropped or letterboxed, and that is your call, not ours to make quietly.
I only have a screenshot / a photo of the design.
Send it anyway and we will tell you honestly whether it will hold up at the size you want. Sometimes it does.
There is fine detail near the edge.
Cutting has a small tolerance, so keep anything you would notice being trimmed — thin outlines, small text — a little inside the edge of the shape. If it is tight, we will say so on the proof.