Sticker Design Online: How to Design Great-Looking Custom Stickers 

If you’re looking for a way to promote a business, a band or even just a great idea, custom stickers can be a low-cost, versatile solution. But printing custom stickers means submitting a digital sticker design online, and if your experience in this area is limited, the process can be daunting.  

What follows is a basic guide to designing your very own custom sticker. 

Your Sticker Printer Online

Before you begin designing your sticker, check the requirements of your sticker printer online. This should give you the accepted formats for graphic work (.pdf, .jpeg, .tff) as well as the required resolution. In most cases, sticker printers will require a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per square inch) or better, in order to ensure professional print quality. A color formats such as ‘CMYK’ may also be specified. 

Your sticker printer may also offer custom sticker design online for a fee. This may be as simple as adding a line of text or a URL to a digital image you already have or as complex as creating an image or logo from scratch. Fees for custom sticker design online and services offered vary from one sticker printer to another. 

Graphics Programs

In order to design your sticker yourself, you will need to have access to a graphics program. You may have a friend or relative who has a copy of Photoshop or Illustrator on their computer you can use—or your computer may have a simple program like Microsoft’s Picture It! already installed. Alternately, Photoshop is now available in a free, ad-supported format online at www.Photoshop.com and tutorials are freely available in many places on the Web. 

A few sticker printers also give you access to a free online sticker design tool specifically created for that purpose.  

Alternately, if you’d like to work from an image that you or someone else has drawn, or a printed image you have, you’ll need to use a scanner, making sure that the scanner is set to the requirements of your sticker printer (ie., 300 dpi) before you scan. If you don’t have a scanner at home, businesses such as Kinko’s or other copy centers can provide access to a scanner for a fee. 

Technical Elements

The most important element to consider in designing your custom sticker is image quality. A good rule of thumb to bear in mind is that if you have pulled an image off the internet, it probably will not be an appropriate resolution to produce a good-looking custom sticker. That’s because images on websites tend to be saved at a lower print resolution (72 dpi) in order to achieve quicker upload times and save space on servers. This is true even if the image looks fine on your computer monitor at the size you have specified. If you’re in doubt about the quality of an image, the best way to check its quality is to print it out on your home printer at the size you want your sticker to be.

Make sure your image quality on  your graphics program is set to 300 dpi or greater, and that your color profile matches the one specified by your sticker printer. Create a new file on whatever graphics program you’re using, making sure it’s the size of the dimensions you want your finished sticker to be. Open any pictures you may want to use, and cut and paste or drag them into your open file. Add text, effects and any other graphics that may be part of your design, and make sure you save it in one of the formats specified by your sticker printer.