If you have read our previous 2 posts, you would have now learnt that there are various types of methods to personalize your gifts and souvenirs with the logo you require. The various types of product printing methods available is not just to suit the various types of material available but also the size as well and shape of the products. The following are the printing suggestions for various surfaces:-
- Rounded Surfaces – This will typically involve pad printing as silkscreen printing involves a need of a screen placed on flat surfaces. Typical examples are golf balls.
- Rounded Bottles/Mugs – For a symmetrical rounded cylindrical surfaces such as bottles and mugs, silkscreen method can also be applied using a roll-print contraption where the screen rolls the bottle on the screen.
- Large Areas – For large areas, silk screen is the preferred method of printing and is only limited by the size of the screen you can make.
A few more factors besides those mentioned above and previous posts that affects the choice of printing method includes the following:-
- Number of Colours – As screen printing involves printing one colour at a time, if the screen printer has no 4 or 6 colour machines available, it is printed and manually adjusted spacing one at a time. Any misallignment will cause inaccurate printing of the gift products. For flat surfaces like tshirts, there are available machines (at a high cost) that are able to process 4-6 colours but is not available easily for uneven surfaces. As such, pad printing is used. The only problem is now, pad printing area has a limited size and may not be able to print cylindrical surfaces nicely.
- Print Quality – As mentioned earlier, some materials can be applied different types of product printing methods on its surface. However, the quality for each of it is different. The best example is frosted glass mugs. Both silkscreen method and decal heat firing method can be used. Heat fired mugs are much higher priced than silkscreen printing but the printing is much longer lasting.
- Desired Effect – Each individual has a preference for a certain type of logo branding. For example, on flat metal surfaces such as name card holders, some people like to have it laser engraved but some does not like their logo to be monotone. Hence some will laser engrave and some will do silkscreen print with colours.
This ends the series on branding/personalized gift products. Coming up next – Packaging and Presentation of Gifts.
Guide to Successful Gift Marketing – Logo Branding 1