Stickers can be highly functional, purely decorative, or some mix of the two. Whether you own a business and need stickers for labelling products, promotions, or providing customers with useful information on a product, or if you’re printing stickers privately for yourself or for friends, getting the design right is a lot easier with these five helpful tips:
Your choice of colours will really matter, especially for smaller stickers. Most of the time, you want them to be eye-catching, certainly not hidden or hard to notice.
Functional stickers like labels for reduced prices or discounts are often bright yellow, pink, or red as these stand out a lot and often catch the customer’s attention first. Products with informational stickers on them which are perhaps less urgent might benefit more from having colours that match the branding or the product itself.
For decorative stickers, the sky’s the limit, of course. Try to choose colours that contrast with one another so that the sticker stands out more.
Stickers tend to be fairly small, but how small? Make sure you scale your design well down to size, and make sure that the size is appropriate for the sticker’s intended usage. Little product stickers might only be a centimetre in diameter or you might have large personal stickers up to a full A4 paper size, more or less.
If in doubt, it’s always a good idea to measure the area where you want to apply the sticker and go from there.
For stickers with text, getting the font right can be critical for getting information across. Functional stickers should have a bold and heavy font that stands out and is completely clear to read. Avoid embellishing these sorts of stickers with unnecessary details whenever possible. With graphic design software, an 8pt font or greater is ideal.
For decorative stickers or those that add supplementary information, readability can still be quite important. Businesses can use branded fonts and colours to keep everything consistent, whereas for private use, you’re free to design your stickers as you like.
Stickers may be text-based, graphics, or a blend of the two. From the point of view of the printer, it’s all ultimately a printed graphic on an adhesive material (a sticker!) whether or not it has text on it.
Because of this, file compression and file type can matter quite a bit. Small graphics might lose a little clarity when printed on a small sticker, but large stickers might turn out pixellated and awful.
Try to stick with vector files over raster files if possible, using filetypes like SVG or print-ready formats like PDF. JPEG and PNG are good, but they can lose clarity so it’s worth getting some test prints done beforehand so you know what they’ll look like in real life.
The most important tip for creating beautiful stickers is to choose a reputable print shop suck as Print on Demand for sticker printing in Melbourne. Whether it’s a fun little sticker to slap onto your luggage, your laptop, refrigerator, or vehicle, or if you need professional business labels and stickers for products, our team can assist you.
Get in touch with Print on Demand for sticker printing in Melbourne and much more.
