While you do want to strive for a unique and attention-grabbing design for your wrappers, it is important that you do so with the proper layout in mind. When you are ready to move on to designing and printing your wrappers, Element Bars will send you a template for your graphic designer to work with.

Once your graphic designer has developed artwork that will work within the template, they will then send it over to us to finalize. We will then make any adjustments needed to make sure it complies with the requirements for both the FDA and printing production. To find out what the FDA label requirements are, please see the FDA requirements section of our wholesale website.

All sticker labels are 2 inches by 5 inches in size and are digitally printed. This simply means that you can select a certain shade of red on the screen, but the red you select may not look the same once it is actually printed. Sticker labels will be printed on sheets and they are color printed edge to edge. Because the labels will be printed immediately next to each other, there will be no space between the designs. When designing your template, you may choose to have a continuous design for this reason. Otherwise, you will have to accept that there will be variances in the designs. Below is sample of the template for the front and back label of your sticker template.

While it is not a requirement, it is strongly preferred that we receive your designs as a vector file. Vector files give us the flexibility to scale your graphics to a certain size without losing any of the resolution. In addition, these files are more efficient to print and they come out a lot cleaner and sharper looking. Vector images are produced in the following file types; AI (Adobe Illustrator), PDF, and EPS (Encapsulated PostScript).

If you still are not sold on vector files, the other option is to have a bitmap file, also known as a raster. This type of file is constructed from pixels, and are usually in the form of a digital picture. Think about a time when you tried to enlarge a photo for printing. Most likely it got pretty blurry and pixelated as you increased the size. The same thing happens when we use these types of files for printing labels. Additionally, even at the required size of 300 dpi (dots per inch), bitmap files will not produce the same quality as vector images. Lines and dots may still be visible to the naked eye on printed labels. We highly recommend vector files.

Now that you know what you are getting printed, it is time to decide how you want it printed. Stickers are always digitally printed, but you have options when it comes to wrappers. The first choice to make is whether the labels will be digitally printed or produced by an offset printer (also known as a flexo printer). There are pros and cons to each, but ultimately it will come down to the type of quality and the amount of money that you choose to spend. For an in depth look at the difference between digital and flexo printing, please visit the Wrapper Options section of the Element Bars wholesale website.

While digital printing is pretty straightforward, flex printing is a bit more complicated because the colors are separated. Because of this, flexo printers utilize one of two methods for color printing.

4 Color Process Printing – The 4 color process is a system where a color image is separated into 4 different color values by the use of filters and screens. By taking the four base colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), the printer takes each dot and places a different color over it until the right combination is obtained. Using the 4 color process makes it much harder to match the color that you see on a computer to what you actually want printed. The other downside is that many imperfections such as dots and lines are more visible to the naked eye.

Spot Color - Instead of creating hues by blending inks during the printing process, spot color printing transfers solid fields of pre-mixed ink directly to the page or object. This means that the color will remain exactly the same with every print run. Since they can’t achieve the same level of color variety as economically as four-color process, spot color designs contain only a limited number of colors (typically between one and three), each applied separately to the desired surface. The maximum amount of colors you should have in this process is 5. Anything beyond that can get very costly.