Three lines decide whether a sticker prints cleanly: the bleed, the cut line and the safe zone. Get those right and almost nothing else can go wrong. Get them wrong and you get white slivers along one edge, or a phone number with its last digit trimmed off.
Here is what each line does.
What is bleed, and why 2.5mm?
Bleed is background artwork that carries on past where the blade will cut.
No cutter is perfect. Ours track to within about a millimetre, which is tight, but if the blade drifts even half of that and your background stops exactly at the cut line, you get a thin white sliver down one edge. Extend the background 2.5mm past the cut and that can never happen — the blade is still cutting through artwork wherever it lands.
Bleed only matters if your design has a background colour or an image that reaches the edge. A black logo floating on white needs none, because the white of the vinyl is the background.
What is the cut line?
The path the blade actually follows.
You do not have to supply one. For standard die cut stickers we generate it for you, following your artwork's outline with a smooth border of about 2.5mm. That border is deliberate: it gives the shape a clean edge and stops fragile points being cut too close.
If you do want to control it yourself, supply the cut line as a single closed vector path with no fill, on its own layer, clearly named. Keep it simple — a path with hundreds of tiny nodes makes the plotter hesitate and the edge comes out slightly faceted rather than smooth.
What is the safe zone?
The area inside the cut line where anything important has to live. We suggest 3mm.
The arithmetic is simple: if the cut can land up to 1mm either side of where it is drawn, then text sitting 1mm from the edge might end up touching it. Three millimetres gives you comfortable clearance and, just as importantly, it looks intentional. Text crowded against the edge of a sticker reads as a mistake even when it survives the cut.
QR codes deserve special mention. They need their quiet zone — the blank margin around the code — or scanners struggle. Put a QR code hard against a sticker edge and you have removed the very thing that makes it scannable.
What file should I send?
Vector, if you have it. EPS, AI, PDF or SVG. A vector file is made of mathematical curves, so it prints crisply at any size — the same file works at 4cm or 40cm.
If all you have is a photo or a raster image, JPG and PNG are fine, but check the resolution: 300 DPI at the size you are printing, not 300 DPI at some smaller size. A 500-pixel-wide logo blown up to a 15cm sticker will look soft no matter how good the printer is.
A quick test: open the image at 100% zoom on screen. If it looks soft there, it will look soft printed.
Why does CMYK matter?
Our solvent printers work in CMYK, the four-ink colour space. Screens work in RGB, which can display colours that no ink can reproduce — the electric blues and vivid greens that look brilliant on a monitor and disappointingly flat in print.
If you set up and export your artwork in CMYK, what you see is much closer to what you get. If you send RGB we convert it, but the conversion makes the decisions rather than you, and the most saturated colours shift the most.
Brand colours matter here. If your logo has an exact colour you need matched, tell us the CMYK values rather than leaving us to interpret a screenshot.
The mistakes that cost a reprint
- No bleed on a full-colour background. The single most common issue we catch.
- Text right against the edge. Looks fine on screen, gets clipped in reality.
- A low-resolution logo scaled up. Pulled off a website at 72 DPI and enlarged.
- RGB artwork with saturated colours, then surprise at the printed result.
- Fonts not outlined or embedded in a supplied PDF, so type reflows to something else.
- A white background baked into a die cut design, when the intent was for the shape to follow the artwork.
- Hairline details on a die cut sticker. Thin spikes are fragile once no backing supports them.
What we check before printing
Every order, free of charge. We look at resolution, bleed, the cut line, whether anything important sits too close to the edge, and whether the colour space will behave. If something looks wrong we contact you before it goes to press rather than after.
We can also fix a lot of it — adding bleed, redrawing a cut line, cleaning up a logo. Ask rather than assuming a file is unusable.
If you would rather see the result first, ask for a print proof before production starts.
The short version
Send vector in CMYK. Run the background 2.5mm past the cut. Keep text 3mm inside it. Let us draw the cut line unless you have a reason not to.
Ready to order? Browse the custom sticker range, or work out what size you need and which cut suits the job first. Still have questions about files or colour? The FAQ covers the specifics, or send us your artwork and we will tell you what it needs.
