Preparing Artwork for Printed Sleeves: A Practical Checklist

Most reprints are not caused by printing errors. They are caused by artwork that was approved before someone noticed a logo was slightly blurry or that a colour did not match the brand. Almost all of it is avoidable with a short checklist before the file leaves your desk.

Work to the dieline

A dieline is the flat template showing where the sleeve will be cut and folded. Ask for it before you start designing, not after — designing to a guessed shape and adapting later is where most layout problems originate.

The dieline shows three things: the cut line, the fold or crease positions, and the glue tab. Anything you place across a fold will be distorted slightly, and anything on the glue tab will be hidden. Keep logos and body text clear of both. On a cone sleeve the taper means a horizontal line in your design will not look horizontal once wrapped, which surprises people the first time they see a physical proof.

Bleed and safety margin

Bleed is artwork extended past the cut line so that a slight shift during cutting does not leave a white sliver at the edge. Three millimetres is standard. If your background colour stops exactly at the cut line, expect white edges on some units.

The safety margin is the inverse: keep important content a few millimetres inside the cut line so it is never trimmed off. Type sitting right at the edge looks deliberate on screen and looks like a mistake on a machine that has a tolerance.

Resolution and vectors

Raster images need to be at least 300 DPI at final print size. The trap is "at final print size" — an image that is 300 DPI at 5 cm is 75 DPI when scaled to 20 cm, and it will look soft. Check resolution after scaling, not before.

Logos and type should be vector wherever possible. Vectors scale without loss and produce genuinely crisp edges. A logo pulled from a website is almost always too low-resolution for print, even when it looks fine on screen — screens are around 72–96 DPI. If the only version you have came from a website, it is worth having it redrawn before it goes onto every sleeve you order.

Colour mode

Design in CMYK, not RGB. Screens emit light and can show colours that ink on board simply cannot reproduce; bright oranges, vivid greens and electric blues are the usual casualties. Converting at the last moment produces a dull surprise.

Where a brand colour must be exact — and for most food brands it must — specify a Pantone rather than relying on a CMYK build. Spot colours are mixed to a standard rather than approximated from four inks, which is why they hold up across reprints. This matters most on kraft, where every ink is affected by the brown base, as it is on custom printed sandwich sleeves.

Fonts

Outline your type or embed the fonts. A file that references a font the printer does not have will substitute something else, and the substitution is often not obvious until the job is printed.

Outlining converts letters to shapes, which guarantees the appearance but means the text can no longer be edited. Keep an editable copy for yourself and send the outlined version. Also be realistic about small type — text below about 6pt reversed out of a dark background tends to fill in, particularly on uncoated stocks.

File format and what to send

Print-ready PDF is the standard. Send it with fonts embedded or outlined, images at full resolution, colour in CMYK plus any spot colours named correctly, and bleed included.

It also helps to send a flattened JPEG or PNG alongside as a visual reference. If anything shifts during processing, the reference shows what the file was meant to look like. Where you are ordering several products together — say cone sleeves and matching custom food trays — send them as separate files rather than multiple designs on one page.

Always look at a proof

A digital proof catches layout errors. A physical proof catches everything else: how the colour actually sits on that stock, whether the fold lands where you expected, whether small type is legible in the hand.

Check the proof against the brief rather than against your memory of the design. Read every word of text aloud — typos survive dozens of on-screen reviews and then appear on twenty thousand sleeves. Confirm the fold positions by wrapping the proof around an actual cone. And check the colour under the lighting your shop actually uses, which is rarely daylight. If anything is unclear, it is far cheaper to raise it before the run starts than after.

The checklist

Before sending: designed to the supplied dieline, 3 mm bleed, important content inside the safety margin, images 300 DPI at final size, logos vector, CMYK with Pantones specified, fonts outlined or embedded, print-ready PDF, and a reference image. Nine items, a few minutes, and it removes most of the reasons jobs get reprinted.