The best way to send us an image/artwork file for an on-bag print, is a single colour (preferably black) vector file, with all fonts, shapes and special characters set to outlines, and within the 52mm (h) x 70mm (w) size. This file should be a .eps or .ai (or a black print on white background 300+ dpi PNG file WITHOUT transparency). If in doubt, download our On Bag Print Artwork Template and refer to the tutorials below in the resources section of this article.
White is the most popular choice amongst customers for on bag print, with black available as an alternate.
The print process is one colour, and applied to the film before being formed into bags. Because of this, we do not hold stock of unbranded bags, as all products are made to order.
Final Bag Alignment
The artwork is printed so the artwork is approximately centred horizontally on the bag, but the bagging process does mean that this can sometimes shift, and is considered acceptable within our production process for slight variances across the order. Vertical alignment is usually slightly below centred on the bag, but again, there are often small variances here due to production processes and bagging requirements. These calculations are made with the end seals at the top and bottom of the finished promo product.
Colour Graduation & Multicolour Logos
As highlighted in our comprehensive study of printer capacity, if you want to capture gradient effects in your artwork, please refer to our article on how standard gradients or colours DO NOT translate to print output. For increased accuracy, we encourage the use of halftones instead and have some examples and instructions on how to use this technique in another blog post.
Note for In-House Designers:
- The on-bag print is a film bonding process between the print ribbon and the plastic film. So if the print area is too dense on the overall artwork, it may cause the film to break, and the artwork not useable in the process. If you are unsure, talk to our team.
- Artwork with dense print close to the edges of the printable area can cause a similar effect to large print coverage.
- Our team may need to occasionally scale any pre-supplied artwork (proportionally) or so to ensure things fit nicely in the printable area along with our other on bag requirements (such as ingredients/nutritional information etc).
- The artwork is loaded as a single colour, black on white background in a file format required for best output on the printer. Black areas print, clear/white areas do not. Areas supplied in colour or greyscale print in non-uniform/non-scaled manner (see on bag print testing for more information on this topic).
- Please do not supply artwork in white, this print colour is determined by the film used in the bagging process (and hence, no artwork change required when you want to swap between white or black on bag print). The differences in output between the two print outputs are related to the properties of the wax/resin film used rather than the messages themselves.
Resources
On Bag Print Template as an Encapsulated PostScript (.EPS) File – Need another format? – contact us.
A really comprehensive article about the difference between raster and vector – https://www.psprint.com/resources/difference-between-raster-vector/
How to convert fonts, shapes or special characters to outlines? https://www.dummies.com/software/adobe/illustrator/how-to-outline-text-in-illustrator-cc/