Label Planet
Our top tips for creating chaos-free Christmas labels.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
The KISS principle should ALWAYS be followed when creating label designs. Don’t go overboard with your designs and make it harder for yourself. Make sure your design is suitable for the capabilities of your software AND for your own design experience.
Just because you CAN add text and images and borders and backgrounds onto your Christmas labels – doesn’t mean you should. The old saying “less is more” can help save you time, keep your stress levels down, and help you create a beautifully professional set of Christmas labels that are the perfect finishing touch for your items, rather than a bit of a muddled mess.
Use A Mail Merge For Address Labels
Mail merges make printing Christmas address labels quicker, easier, and a lot more accurate than typing/pasting addresses one by one. It means you can quickly combine a label template with a list of addresses. While the mail merge process can seem quite daunting, it only involves six simple steps. If you use the Mail Merge Wizard, Word will guide you through each step.
We regularly feature mail merge advice on both our A4 Labels and Label Templates blogs (especially around Christmas); simply enter “Mail Merge” in the search box and you’ll find plenty of hints and tips to guide you through the process – and get you out of trouble if things start to go wrong.
View our How To video for a step by step guide to using Mail Merge to make labels.
Centralise Your Designs
Christmas labels tend to be more decorative and more complicated than other designs. To keep control of your design and make it easier to print your template accurately, we recommend using a centralised design. This means that all of your elements expand out from the centre of each label. Centralising designs is especially useful for different label shapes – especially round labels / circular labels and oval labels.
Beware & Take Care With Coloured Background & Borders
Many customers want to add decorative features such as coloured background and/or borders to their Christmas labels. While you CAN do this, you may find white edging appearing when you print your template. White edging (perhaps more accurately “blank edging”) describes a printing problem whereby your designs don’t quite fully align with your sticky labels – leaving some of your edges unprinted.
You can avoid this issue by oversizing background and borders. This works best if there are gaps all the way around your labels; the oversized background and border will overlap each label – falling into the blank (or “bleed”) area around the labels. You can usually accomplish this with standard label templates but we do also supply bleed templates (where possible), which indicate the bleed area available for you to use to oversize your background and/or border.
If your labels butt up (touch) against other labels on your sheet, you can only use this method if your background or border uses a consistent colour. Alternatively, you will need to select a different design that does not require the use of a coloured background and/or border – or, more specifically, that does not require printing at the very edges of your labels.