Stickers: vinyl, paper and contour cutting

Paper works for stickers that stay indoors and stay dry: on boxes, envelopes, jars on a shelf. Vinyl is for anything that goes outside, gets washed, rubbed or refrigerated. Contour cutting is a separate decision, about shape: the sticker follows the exact outline of the design instead of being a rectangle or a circle.

Paper or vinyl: it depends on where the sticker lives

Avery Dennison, one of the big makers of self-adhesive materials, lists the questions to ask about paper labels, and they are exactly where paper and film part ways: resistance to humidity and water, to oil and grease, to UV light and heat, to scuffing and tearing. Paper can take a varnish or a laminate, which protects it and changes how it looks. What paper has that film doesn't is texture. A matte, slightly rough stock feels good in the hand and looks right on a handmade product.

For outdoor use, the same manufacturer says PVC film (vinyl) is the usual choice for labels exposed to the elements, because it lasts. There's one more difference: films are also chosen by how well they conform. On a soft bottle that gets squeezed, you need a flexible film, not a rigid one.

What contour cutting means

A standard sticker is cut straight: square, rectangle, circle. With contour cutting, the machine follows the shape of the design, usually with a thin white border around it. That's how you get stickers shaped like a character, a logo or an object.

There are two versions, depending on how deep the blade goes:

• Cut through the backing: each sticker comes out on its own, with the backing paper cut to the same shape. Good for dropping into parcels or handing out at events.
• Cut through the face only: the stickers stay on a shared sheet and you peel them off one by one. Good when you want several designs on one sheet.

How to set up the file

The machine cuts along a line you draw in the file, not along what it "sees" in the image. On Roland equipment, for example, the cut line is a vector path stroked with a spot color named exactly CutContour. Roland points out that the name has to match exactly, or the software won't treat it as a cut line. In Illustrator, the color goes on the stroke, not the fill.

Three rules that save you a reprint:

1. The cut line is vector. The artwork can be a photo, but the path the machine follows is drawn with the pen tool or generated from the vector shape.
2. The color runs slightly past the line. Roland recommends extending the background beyond the cut line, otherwise a thin white edge shows up when the cut drifts a little from the print. There's more on edges in our article on bleed and the trim line.
3. Text stays away from the edge. Same logic: if the cut shifts a little, you don't want it slicing through a letter.

Details that don't come out well

Contour cutting has limits. Very sharp corners and thin "arms" in a design tear when you peel the sticker or lift after a few days. Small holes inside the shape (the inside of a letter "o", for instance) are hard to weed from the backing. That's why we often simplify the outline: round it off and leave a white border that holds the design together.

If the sticker has small text, check it at actual size. What reads fine on screen at 400% won't read on a 5 cm sticker.

You'll find the formats and materials we work with on our stickers page.