Choosing your design program
Many professional designers have access to Adobe products to create a design from scratch, but with platforms like Canva, anyone can create simple, print-ready designs in no time. Watch our videos below to learn more about how to design your shipping box.
SUPPORTED
A great print design consists of one color, without large sections of black fill or graphic effects like gradients or drop shadows. Ideal print files are vector and have a transparent background.
Accepted vector file types:
.eps, .ai, .pdf, .svg
NOT SUPPORTED
Reverse backgrounds to remove black fill. Background saturation can bleed into your reversed logotype and create legibility issues during printing and curing.
Large swatches of ink will transfer well into your boxes’ shipping life leaving ink smudges on hands, products and surfaces.
NOT RECOMMENDED
Our design team can calibrate your logo to have two values using a dot matrix to create black and less black, but we cannot guarantee print will look as expected.
Work with your logo designer to create a single-color version of your logo file to isolate logo elements for screen print or email our design team for recommendations: design@customboxes.io
NOT RECOMMENDED
Gradients are not supported in our production. We recommend removing gradients, watercolor graphics, starburst fades, drop shadows and foil/glitter/metallic elements from your printing artwork.
Our design team will adjust the values in dot matrix to maintain legibility, but for best results submit artwork without these graphic effects.
File Size and Resolution
We strongly encourage high resolution 300 ppi images. Lower resolutions (below 300 ppi) have noticeably lower print quality when converted to half-tone for printing. Ideal files are less than 5MB.
Sizing Graphic Elements Correctly
Text should be at least 10pts at printing size - regardless of how it may look on screen. If designing "knockout text" (where the text is blank on a solid black background), minimum text size is 16pt, but knockout text is not recommended for printing on corrugate.
QR Codes: A minimum size of .9" x .9" is recommended. Barcodes: Minimum width recommended of approx 2.2” wide (150%) for UPC-A type barcodes. Minimum height recommendation is .5".
Printing Black Ink
Black text or linework should have a CMYK value 0-0-0-100 (black ink only), not a combined or “rich” black value. Large areas of solid black, such as a black background, are best set to our “rich” black value (CMYK 60-40-40-100) to avoid banding in the final print.
Convert your file to black ink only if your logo or graphic contains multiple colors. Contact our designers if you need help making sure your logo will print legibly in black ink.
Check Margins and Edges
At this time our printing process does not support bleeds (printing beyond the cut edge of the box) nor print on scored or folded areas of the box. Thus, graphics cannot be printed to the edge or folded around the corners.
Check that your design has a buffer margin of at least 0.5" around the edge of the selected box panel. Anything within this margin is safe and should not be cut-off in printing. Due to the manual nature of this print process imperfections on some edge areas and details are expected.
Unprintable Files
For optimal print quality, we require black, single-color files for printing black ink on shipping boxes. Gradients, photographs, black backgrounds, and drop shadows are not supported as they can affect clarity and overall print quality. We do minimal file conversion to maintain design integrity.
If files that don't meet our requirements are submitted, print quality will be compromised and we will not provide refunds or replacements for the printed boxes. While we strive to provide great prints, our capabilities are limited with low-resolution images or colorful files.
If we contact you with concerns about the print quality of the provided file, offer guidance, and no action is taken, please be aware that we cannot offer refunds or replacements for boxes with suboptimal prints.
To ensure the best results, please upload black, single-color files specifically designed for printing on shipping boxes. If you have any questions, our customer support team is here to assist you.
Thank you for choosing our services, and we appreciate your cooperation in achieving the best possible print results for your shipping boxes.
