Bleed is extra artwork extending 3mm past the cut line, so tiny cutting variations never leave a white sliver on your sticker's edge. CMYK is the ink colour space printing actually uses — different from your screen's RGB. Get these two right and almost everything else takes care of itself.
Every printed sticker gets cut out, and no cutter on earth hits the exact same line every time — there's always a fraction of a millimetre of drift. Bleed is the insurance: you extend your background colour or image 3mm beyond the cut line, so if the cut lands slightly outside the design, it cuts through more background instead of exposing white material.
The flip side is the safe zone: keep text and anything important at least 3mm inside the cut line, so drift in the other direction can't clip it. Background to the outside, content to the inside — that's the whole discipline.
If your artwork stops exactly at the cut line, a cut that drifts outward by even half a millimetre leaves a hairline of unprinted white along one edge — the classic homemade-sticker look. When artwork arrives without bleed, our pre-press team will usually extend or mirror the edges for you and show you the result on your free proof, but designs with detail near the edge are better set up correctly from the start.
Your screen makes colour with light (RGB: red, green, blue). A press makes colour with ink (CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, black). RGB can produce intensely luminous colours — electric blues, neon greens — that physical ink simply cannot match. When an RGB file is printed, those colours get translated to their nearest CMYK equivalent, which can look slightly duller than what you saw on screen.
What to do about it: design in CMYK from the start if your software allows it, and treat ultra-vivid neon tones with suspicion — if a colour looks like it's glowing on your screen, ink won't reproduce the glow. If you send us an RGB file, we convert it carefully in pre-press and the free digital proof shows you the result before anything prints.
| Setting | What we want |
|---|---|
| Format | PDF preferred; PNG, JPG, SVG, AI and EPS all accepted |
| Resolution | 300 DPI at the printed size |
| Bleed | 3mm on all sides |
| Safe zone | Text and logos 3mm inside the cut line |
| Colour | CMYK ideally; RGB accepted and converted in pre-press |
| For clear vinyl | Transparent background (so we know what stays clear) |
Vector files (AI, SVG, EPS, vector PDF) deserve a special mention: they scale to any size with zero quality loss, which makes them the best possible file for logos and text-heavy designs.
DPI is print resolution — how much image detail exists per inch. A logo grabbed off a website at 72 DPI looks fine on screen but prints soft and pixelated at sticker size. 300 DPI at the size you're printing is the standard. The catch people miss: a 300 DPI image enlarged to twice its size is effectively 150 DPI. When in doubt, send the biggest original you have and we'll tell you honestly what it can support.
This guide is here so you can set files up like a pro — but every order includes a free digital proof with unlimited revisions, and our pre-press team checks bleed, resolution and colour on every file. Nothing prints until you've approved exactly what you'll get. Full details on the artwork guide, or just send us your file and let us do the fiddly part.
Configure your stickers with live pricing, upload your artwork, and approve your free proof — die-cut stickers, sticker sheets or roll labels.