You Need The Very Best Graphic Designers To Design Your Product Labels

_{Ian Renton  | 25/03/2019 | Label Design Tips,Product Labels}

When I state that you need the very best graphic designers to design your product labels, it is said to help you. Like all label printing companies, we employ a graphic design team. We do not charge to receive your artwork. Our designers will check your artwork before adding it to the print queue.

However, not everything goes that smoothly. Often, the artwork needs to be modified slightly to be compatible with our label printing machines. That is OK but quite often our team of graphic designers, spend many hours fixing up errors from our customers graphic designers.

It is a mistake to skimp on graphic design as this can add to your expense later on. Firstly, you may need to pay two graphic design fees, one from your own designer and one from us to fix up your designer's artwork. It is very important to get the right design for your printed labels. We understand that when launching a product for the first time or expanding your range or even rebranding, your priority is to get your product labels printed as quickly as possible. You want to sell your products without delay and the graphic design seems like an opportunity to save some money, especially as you are already spending money on your containers and your labels.

You have thousands of graphic designers to choose from. The best questions to ask a potential graphic designer are these:

1. Have you prepared plenty of print ready artwork or do you mainly do design for websites?
2. Have you ever designed product labels before?

If you get two negative answers, then that graphic designer is not for you. Here are seven points to help your graphic designer design the best product labels.

Seven Points To Help Your Graphic Designers Design The Best Product Labels

1. Provide a high resolution file of at least 300 dpi (The internet demands low resolution for faster loading but high resolution enables a better print quality).  
2. Provide bleed and crop marks. The importance of bleed in label printing becomes apparent when your labels have a colour background. The artwork must extend about 3mm past the outer edge of the label so that the colour is shown right to the edge of the labels. Crop marks enable to labels to be cut in the right spot.  
3. PDF Files are preferred. We can also accept AI files, TIFF files and EPS files. JPG files are compressed and are not suitable for printing.  
4. All text files should be outlined or font files should be included. This is because we do not have every font in our system so we need to be able to reproduce your artwork in the font you provided.  
5. All images should be embedded or supplied separately. We need to be able to exactly reproduce the images you provide us for your labels.  
6. CMYK files please. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK. Most of the labels we do are printed digitally. We don't need the colours separated for digital label printing.  
7. Unflattened files are preferred. To set up your artwork for print we need to open it in Adobe Illustrator. An unflattened or editable file allows us to easily pick out any parts of your artwork that might need adjusting to suit our printer. Examples would be separating cut-lines from the print files or fixing bleed that was missed without having to stretch your entire label. Basically, we need the original editable files to ensure we can print exactly what you need.

Graphic design is too important in the production of effective product labels to be left to the amateurs. Get a professional graphic designer. You can contact us on (02) 9160 45111 or email information to info@rentonslabels.com.au. Our team of graphic designers will be pleased to help you with design and printing to ensure you receive product labels that are designed to sell.

If you have created your artwork yourself, using an online tool like Canva, it's important you know how to save these in the right file format and with the right details so there will be no issue when printing your product labels. Check out our guide here on how to save a Canva file for print in CMYK with bleed and crop marks.