Custom Stickers: The Dos and Don'ts

Stickers are more than fun decorations for kids. They have the power to brand you or your company, personalize your laptop or helmet, and decorate a wall or sign. These small adhesives have become powerful marketing tools and are simple to make, yet a good sticker can be tough to design. You need to design these custom stickers so they eye-catching. Much thought and time must be placed into designing one of these small custom stickers; however, deciding upon a design isn’t even the hard part.

You want a sticker's form to match its function. If your sticker is going to be used as an electronic skin or on another portable device, it may receive a lot of wear and tear. Stickers placed on mailboxes must have the protective coating to eliminate any damage from heavy wind and constant UV rays. To ensure high quality while printing, certain colors, sizes and cuts must also be taken into consideration. Here are a few of the do's and don’ts of sticker designing to ensure your creations are produced with the highest quality.

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What to Do

The first step when designing any type of product is to brainstorm and decide exactly what you want to create. In this case, think about the sticker itself; consider the size of the product and how busy you want the design to be. A large sticker with a lot of color, fancy elements and small objects may overwhelm a potential customer looking at the product. Consider who your product is for and match the design and size of the sticker to that audience.

For artwork with lots of color, it is ideal to create your images in a CMYK color format. CMYK is a four-color process used in printing. You can convert any image to a CMYK format through image editing software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. RGB is another popular color format, though it isn't recommended for color printing. It's often difficult to match colors using RGB, and your sticker's colors may not turn out as sharp and vibrant as they could using CMYK. RGB can be converted to CMYK, but the colors might shift.

If the image or background color on your sticker covers most of the sticker’s surface, it is recommended to place a bleed line around the design. This is a line around the design that gives the printer extra room in case of color bleeding or slight movements when the sticker is cut. Most stickers recommend a minimum 1/16” - 1/8” bleed line around the outer edge of the sticker.

What Not to Do

With custom stickers, you can include any image or graphic you want in the design. You can make a sticker with a picture of your face, your boyfriend's face, the logo of your favorite team, a picture of your mother-in-law – you get the picture. However, many individuals will upload an image smaller than the area they want to cover and will stretch the image to make it fit in the desired space. This is a common design error that will make your sticker images blurry and pixilated, so steer clear of it.

Do not try to design custom stickers in one sitting. By rushing a design, you may miss important information and skip over small details. We recommend creating a design and walking away from it for a day or two. Then come back and look at the design. When you look at it with fresh eyes you will notice what sticks out, what needs to be fixed and what you do or do not like about the design.

Most importantly, do not forget the basics. Don't use fonts that are difficult to read. You want people to be able to read your sticker without having to squint at it. Here's a quick design tip: If you're creating a brand for a company, don’t design a logo that can only be used in color. Your design won’t always be displayed in color, and you need to create a logo that will appear clean and sharp no matter what the color is.