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Thank You.

Well, not at Label Apeel.

Our new-fangled printing techniques mean that our digital labels are of pretty much identical quality to the flexographic ones. In short, even if you’re only producing your product in small numbers, it can still look the part.

Moho organic cider, who have been using our digital press since the shiny new marvel arrived in January, have been such a hit that we’ve had to upgrade them to flexographic labels for larger production runs. And the two types of labels will be indistinguishable from one another.

We were going to invite you to spot the difference between the two types of labels. But you can’t. So instead, we’ve got on Photoshop and created a proper spot the difference game below.

Send your answers to info@labelapeel.co.uk with “competition” in the subject line. You could win something. A crayon, perhaps. Or a blob of Blu-Tac.

It might be a simple thing, but do you get excited like a small child when you scratch off a panel with a coin? After all, you might be on the verge of winning something amazing. No? Just us then.

Whether it’s to reveal your winning lottery code or keeping your PIN number protected, we have the technology to create labels with various scratch-off panels for you.

We did wonder about making entire product labels into scratch-off ones. After all, it would make the supermarket trip more interesting. Maybe that’s a bit far, eh.

For those of you who have grown up in caves and never experienced the thrill, you can watch our scratch-off labels doing what they do best below.

Historically tooling costs have been a barrier to embossing. However, with the development of new systems and the lower costs they bring, embossing as a design feature is opening up to a much wider range of products and brands.

As with any design feature, embossing still remains an investment and it needs to be used wisely with a clear view to achieving a tangible return. To help you to achieve the maximum impact, we have put together a few do’s and don’ts for you and your design team to consider before incorporating embossing in your design.

Material

The right material will improve the amount of relief (how raised) the image is. When selecting material the relationship to keep in mind is between the thickness usually measured in microns and the weight, which is measured in grams per square meter. The greater the thickness to weight ratio then the more space there is between the fibres. It is this space that the embossing tool squashes out to create the raised surface – so thicker, lighter paper is better. The standard papers used by most label printers are 80gsm and are 70micron thick. These will hold an embossed image but it will not be brilliant. For the best results, you should be looking for a 90gsm material, which is 120micron thick. It is possible to emboss plastics and achieve reasonable results, however you should always produce trials as different images and different materials achieve different results.

Overprinting Embossed Images

Embossing is a subtle and sophisticated way of raising the profile of a product. It can be enhanced by applying colour, but it must be done well. An embossed gold wash looks great but where the embossed image is overprinted with gold then this rarely works; a simple case of over guilding the lily. If you do want to use ink on top of the embossing, our advice is to think bold. This is not a time for intricate and fine detail, and works best when you use larger blocks of image.

We recently had the chance to flex our creative muscle and really put our technical knowledge to the test by creating a label for our water bottles. With the use of foils, an emboss, spot colours and tricky cutting forms we created something pretty special. The bottle also features a QR barcode which once clicked on with your smart phone takes you directly to this blog. Clever stuff. If you’d like to see one of these first hand then please feel free to give us a call and pop in.