Label Planet
Here's our list of ways to help you keep calm and carry on printing self adhesive labels.
Our customers cover the entire range of label printers; from those who’ve never tried before (and might be of limited technological knowhow) to those who print labels all day, every day.
Regardless of whether you’re a newcomer or an expert, it is inevitable that – sometimes – things will go wrong. Here's how you can keep calm and carry on printing - without the need for panic.
- Plan Ahead
Labels tend to be a bit of an afterthought; the last piece in a puzzle that may have been days, weeks, months, or even years in the planning – and this means people often simply don’t leave themselves enough time to get their labels designed AND printed and so they end up encountering problems at the very last minute. While label designing and printing can be a simple and swift process, sometimes it simply isn’t and requires a bit of thought and time to get things just the way you want them.
So, take the time to think about what you want your labels to do, what you want them to look like, and plan ahead. Give yourself some time to play around with templates and design, so you get an idea of what works (and what doesn’t), what is practical, and what is possible (and, indeed, impossible!). Different software and hardware has different limitations, so you need to make sure you can work with what you’ve got.
As part of this, consider taking advantage of our free template downloads, our advice pages, and our sample request service.
- Keep Things Simple
“Less is more” is a very useful tip to remember when designing labels. Labels are naturally limited in size, which means you need to make the most of the space you’ve got. Simply piling EVERYTHING in and adding EVERY design feature you can think of will only result in a label that’s difficult to design, align, and, then when you’ve finally done your printing, is actually really difficult to read. Think about what you NEED your labels to do and only include the text and design elements that help to accomplish this aim.
- Use Copy & Paste (But Use It Carefully)
When designing labels, a useful trick is to set up your design in the top left label first and get it as perfect as you can, before copying and pasting it into the other labels. Most software will provide a paste function that will copy and paste both the design elements you have included in your template AND the formatting and settings you have chosen to get things just right.
You should take care, however, to think before you paste to make sure that you don’t end up creating problems in your template. Some templates account for the gaps between labels and if you paste INTO these gaps, it can throw off the alignment of the entire template. You should also make sure that your template doesn’t automatically resize itself to account for the size of items that you are pasting into the template and take care that it doesn’t insert any extra space or rows/columns when you paste.
- Adapt ALL Aspects Of Your Template
Templates are designed to give a basic framework that you can adapt to suit your individual needs. You will always need to select the format options that will create the precise design that you want and to adapt the margins and layout to produce the best possible result for the specific combination of software and hardware that you have available.
It isn’t always enough to simply enter your text and/or images; you need to select the formats for that text and/or those images that produce the design you want. If the text and/or images you are adding simply don’t sit where they should or look like they should, you should take a look through all of the available formatting options for those items to find the best possible combination of settings to produce the finished result that you want. If the alignment isn’t quite right, then you may need to adjust the margins, page layout, and printer settings to find the options that work best for the unique combination of software, printer, and label product that you are using.
- Do A Test Print First
Once you’ve got your template all set up, it’s so very tempting to simply load up your printer with your labels and press print.
DON’T!
Our advice is to always do a test print onto blank paper first, so that you can hold the resulting print against a sheet of your labels and confirm for yourself that everything is sitting where it should be – without wasting any of your actual sheets of labels.
Doing a test print first will weed out any inaccuracies in your template or any issues with your printer settings that could cause problems with the final alignment of your printed labels. All software and printers vary slightly, so what you see on your screen isn’t necessarily what you’ll get when you press print. It might be that you need to make a slight adjustment to your margins to get the print to sit in the perfect position, or your printer may be using settings that simply won’t produce the perfect print. Doing a quick test print first can save you time, money, and a lot of heartache if things go wrong.
Helpful Links From The Label Planet Website