Stickers and labels: which material and how to prepare the file

It is the first choice and it decides how the sticker will look in reality, not on screen.

White backing. The white substrate sits under the print and gives colours back as you designed them: crisp, full, identical on any surface. It is the choice for packaging labels, promotional dots, bottle labels, badges. If the sticker has to be read, white is the answer.

Clear backing. The print goes onto glass, acrylic or plastic and the unprinted area disappears: only the artwork remains, as if painted onto the surface. Beautiful on a shop window or a clear bottle.

⚠️ Here is what to know before designing: on clear stock, white is not printed. Printing adds ink, it does not remove it: wherever your artwork is white, the sticker stays clear and the colour underneath shows through. A white logo on clear film, applied to dark glass, simply vanishes.

If you need actual white on a transparent surface, the route is not clear stock: it is a white sticker cut to the shape of the artwork. It costs a little more in cutting, but the white is there.

Adhesive paper is an indoor material. On packaging, bottles kept in a cellar or a shop, boxes, badges, shelves and archives it lasts for years. Outdoors, exposed to rain and sun, it does not: paper absorbs moisture, edges lift and colours fade. If the sticker has to live outside in the weather, this is not the material, and it is better said in advance than discovered in September.

Four things about the receiving surface that decide whether it holds:

• Smooth and clean, always. Adhesive sticks to the surface, not to dust: a wipe of alcohol and a dry cloth beat any amount of glue.
• Rough surfaces do not hold. Exposed corrugated board, raw wood, walls: the sticker rests only on the ridges and peels off within days.
• Tight curves are a limit. On a bottle 5 cm across, a label 12 cm wide will not lie flat: it creases at the corners. Rule of thumb: on a bottle, label width should not exceed two thirds of the circumference, and rounded corners help far more than sharp ones.
• Cold and fridge humidity reduce the grip of paper. For chilled-counter product labels, say so when ordering: the precautions change and it is worth deciding together whether paper is the right choice.

One last point that seems obvious and is not: stickers do not come off cleanly. On packaging that will be resold, or on furniture, they leave glue residue. If clean removal matters, say so first.

A label on a product for sale is not just graphics: it carries information someone must genuinely be able to read, and for food some of it is required by law.

There is a precise measurement for text size. The European food information regulation (EU 1169/2011) sets a minimum character height: 1.2 mm x-height — the lowercase body, not the full character — dropping to 0.9 mm only on packaging with a surface under 80 cm². In practice: on a small label, an ingredients list at 5 pt is not a style choice, it is non-compliant. If space is short, the label must grow or be reorganised — not the text shrunk.

⚠️ Which information is mandatory for your product — ingredients, allergens, batch, best-before, producer's address, nutritional values — depends on what you sell, and responsibility lies with the producer. We print what you give us: if in doubt, check with your adviser before ordering five thousand labels, because a change after printing costs as much as the print.

Cosmetics follow different and equally precise rules, again the producer's responsibility.

Two practical habits from the counter:

• Batch and best-before are better left in a clear area, to be printed or stamped separately: build them into the artwork and every batch change means a full reprint.
• Barcodes must be black on a light background, with the quiet zone at the sides intact. A barcode on a coloured background, or too small, will not scan at the till — and you find out from the customer.

If the sticker has a shape other than a rectangle, the file has to say where to cut. It cannot be guessed from the artwork: a white outline on a white background does not exist as far as the machine is concerned.

How to prepare it:

1. A separate layer, named taglio or cut, above the artwork.
2. Inside it, one closed vector line following the contour you want. One, not three stacked.
3. A recognisable spot colour — 100% magenta works well — set to overprint, so it does not knock out the artwork beneath.
4. The rest as always: 2-3 mm of bleed beyond the cut path, 3 mm of safety margin inwards for text and logo, CMYK at 300 dpi.

If the sticker is rectangular or square no cut path is needed: dimensions are enough. And it is worth remembering that rounded corners — even a 2-3 mm radius — are not a flourish: a sharp corner is always where a sticker starts to lift.

On delivery: stickers can come on sheets (cheaper, you peel them) or already separated one by one. For a run to be applied by hand to five hundred bottles, the second option saves an afternoon.

To order we need four things, and we always ask for these: final size, backing (white or clear), quantity and when you need it. With the file at stampa@guug.it a quote arrives within an hour during shop hours.