How to Prepare Your Artwork for Print

So much work goes into creating outstanding products, whether you’re an entrepreneur working on a line of skin care products from plants or an established company maintaining your reputation for quality. From conducting thorough R&D to selecting the perfect sources for ingredients and establishing the process for creation, we understand there is a lot that goes into finally bringing your product to the shelf with preparing artwork for print.

Preparing Label Artwork for Print

While packaging concerns may be secondary to product creation, they do play an important role in influencing consumer buying decisions. As with every step of the process toward your final product, you’ve likely put a lot of thought and energy into how you want to present that product to potential customers. Label design is key to communicating important information as well as showcasing your brand in the best light, so making sure everything is just right for your label creation is nearly as essential as the rest of your production process.

The Inovar team understands that creating perfect label artwork can be a challenge. Even for experienced designers, problems can easily arise since different printers have different guidelines for how artwork should be created. We always want your experience ordering labels with us to go as smoothly as possible.

Guidelines for Label Artwork for Print

Submitting label artwork that is print ready will ensure your label printing process goes off without a hitch. For complete instruction, talk to us directly, but for some quick tips on artwork setup, read on!

When having your label artwork designed, ask your designer to package your design using the following guidelines:

• Colors: Colors will appear differently from screen to print jobs, so if you have color expectations, make sure you communicate them to us. Set your files to CMYK (not RBG) in your design program.
• Fonts:Not all design programs or computers for that matter contain the same fonts. All text should be converted to outlines and/or the font file should be provided with the artwork.
• Image Resolution:All images should be embedded and should have a 300 dpi resolution at print size (the size of your label).
• Bleeds:Any color or image used on your label should extend past the quoted label size by .0625”. We also recommend keeping necessary text and images within .125” of the dieline. If you want more detailed information about dielines and other print-related terms, check out this post on artwork and printing definitions.

This list is far from extensive, so we strongly recommend you talk to your label specialist prior to submitting artwork. We have a dedicated prepress team as well as the best customer support around, so if you feel a little overwhelmed with the technical aspects of label art creation, don’t hesitate to contact us!