Label Planet
A roundup of all of our "Designing A Label Template" tips and advice.
This post gathers together our "Designing A Label Template" tips to make the process of designing a label template for your labels as trouble-free as possible.
Presenting Label Planet’s Top Ten Top Tips For Designing Your Own Label Template!
1. Keep Things Simple
Most people print their own labels because it is a quick and easy way for them to create bespoke or personalise labels without having to spend time and money paying a designer and printer to do the job for them. Choosing an overly complex design is a sure-fire way to find yourself wasting time and money trying to replicate a design that far exceeds the limitations of your software, your hardware, and/or your own abilities when it comes to digital design.
2. Plan Your Design Before You Start
Taking a moment to sketch out your design (and type out the contents of your label) is a quick way to double check that:
- Your design fits onto your labels without looking cluttered or messy
- Your label design accomplishes what you need it to do AND looks professional
Making changes to a hand-drawn sketch is MUCH quicker and easier than getting partway through your design and realising that it isn’t going to work.
3. Start With The Background & Work Forward
If you’re creating a design with a lot of different elements (that need to be layered or that overlap to create your completed design) then it is always best to start with the “background” layer and work your way forward.
4. Use Cut, Copy, & Paste (Carefully) To Make The Design Process Quicker & More Accurate
Cut, copy, and paste are easy to use functions that can speed up the entire process of designing a label template; you can use these functions to add different elements to your template from an external source AND you can also use them to replicate your design in order to add it to all of the labels within your template. Using copy and paste is a much more accurate way to adjust and/or replicate your design by duplicating one item rather than inserting multiple items and attempting to adjust them one by one AND it can be used to duplicate both content and the formatting options you have applied to your content.
5. Remember That Formatting Matters
If you don’t bother to change certain formatting options from their defaults, you may find that you are limited in the tools that are available to you AND in how accurate you can be with the changes that you make to the various elements within your design – especially when it comes to positioning and layering different elements together.
6. Centralise Your Design
Using a centralised layout makes it easier to make sure that ALL of your design fits neatly onto ALL of your labels – and can avoid problems around the edges of your labels (see tip 7).
7. Take Care At The Edges
If your label design goes all the way to the edge of each label, you need to make sure that you aren’t setting yourself up for alignment nightmares when you come to print your labels; avoid narrow borders (which are nearly impossible to align perfectly) and only use a full colour background if you have space to overlap your design slightly (without creating a mismatch on labels that “butt up” against one another).
8. Don’t Be Afraid To Use Bleed
While you might be preoccupied with making sure that your design fits INSIDE each label, if you want to add a coloured background or a border you may be better off deliberately oversizing your design so that it overlaps (bleeds over) the edges of your labels to prevent any white edging appearing on your labels.
9. Be Aware Of The Unprintable Area
Most desktop printers cannot print all the way to the edge of an A4 sheet, creating an “unprintable area” around the edges of a label sheet; if any part of any of your labels falls into the unprintable area of your particular printer then you need to make sure that your design doesn’t involve adding any print to those parts of your labels.
10. Put Your Text In Text Boxes
If you are creating multiple sections of text, it may be worth putting each section into its own text box so that you have greater control over where the different elements in your design sit on each label. Adding your text as one block and then trying to manually space out your text to create your required design layout is unlikely to give you anything like the precision you need to replicate your design as accurately as you’d like.