Sticker 101: Your Essential Guide to Sticker Printing

Are you looking for a low-cost, high-impact marketing strategy for your business? Or do you simply want to explore your options? 

We are here to help you hit your growth targets with custom stickers. Yes, you heard right! Stickers are the secret weapon of marketing. 

As they are so low-cost, they can easily be added to every order or purchase. Given in the right moment, stickers will not be perceived as advertising, but seen as a gift instead. This adheres to social psychology’s rule of reciprocity: the receiver feels the need to return the favor, which can take the form of a purchase, a recommendation or even a social media post. 

But how do you unlock that superpower? The first step is to find the perfect sticker printing company that will create a high-quality product for you. 

In this article, we will give you some pointers to ensure your artwork will print crisply and will fly through the production process. 

1. Supply high resolution artwork 

Your artwork is the foundation of your sticker. Make sure you submit in the highest quality possible.

For text and simple designs, you should supply a vector format. A vector consists of shapes and lines, which makes it really easy to scale your artwork. If you want to print images or intricate designs, you can submit a bitmap. 

Bitmaps are made out of dots, so-called pixels, which are measured per inch. Your file should at least have 300 dots per inch for it to print nicely. 

2. Convert Colors into CMYK

Not all the colors you can see on your screen can be printed.

Your screen operated within an RGB code. Red, green and blue are used to create 16,777,216 colors. This is an additive color model, meaning the more colours we add, the closer we get to white, 

Printers, on the other hand, print using cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). With these combinations, we can create about 16,000 different colors.

Before you submit your artwork, you want to convert the colors in your file to CMYK. This way, you can be sure that the colours will print exactly how you can see them on your computer screen. In most cases, you can also send over a CMYK color reference. 

3. Beware of small text

You obviously want all your text to be legible when printed. To ensure that, sticker printers use a minimum height requirement. This describes the smallest size your text can be while still being readable. 

We recommend a minimum of 1.2mm which roughly translates into 8pt, depending on the font used. 

It is worth looking at your design at 100% scale. This way you can double-check how small your text will be in relation to the size of your sticker. 

4. Find your perfect material 

Many suppliers offer a great range of materials to choose from. You can choose between paper and vinyl stickers. 

Paper stickers are great for short-term indoor uses. They are also eco-friendly and can be recycled with most packaging materials. 

Vinyl stickers are a lot more durable and perfect for outdoor applications. You can frequently choose between receiving holographic, glitter or transparent stickers to make your design really stand out. 

This is all you need to master the sticker printing process! If you keep these pointers in mind, nothing can go wrong when you order your next – or maybe first? – batch of stickers. If you are already using stickers, we would love to see them. Feel free to share them in the comments below.