Packaging trademark design in screen printing

Packaging trademark design in screen printing

Summary of Information:

In recent years, with the continuous development of screen printing technology, its application fields have been expanding. In the packaging and anti-counterfeiting fields where flexographic, lithographic, and intaglio printing are the main printing methods, screen printing has gradually opened up its market. Screen printing has occupied a large share of the packaging printing market with its unique advantages.

In recent years, with the continuous development of screen printing technology, its application fields have been expanding. In the packaging and anti-counterfeiting fields where flexographic, lithographic, and intaglio printing are the main printing methods, screen printing has gradually opened up its market. Screen printing has occupied a large share of the packaging printing market with its unique advantages and is showing a stable growth trend. Moreover, through combined printing with other printing methods, screen printing has become the main partner for other printing methods in combination and online operation, such as the EM series flexible plate printing machines produced by the Swiss Jelas Group, where more than 90% of the models are equipped with rotary screen printing units. Such printed packaging boxes or trademarks, labels, etc. not only highlight the brand characteristics of the packaged products but also enhance the anti-counterfeiting function.

When printing transparent material labels or trademarks, it is necessary to first use screen printing to print the background color, and then use offset printing or flexographic printing to print the colorized logos and patterns. This combined printing method makes the printing effect different from that of ordinary labels and can improve the product's grade. From the trend of market development, this printing method will become increasingly popular.

Screen printing has excellent coverage effects and can be applied to the surface printing of transparent materials and also for printing gold ink, silver ink, and hot stamping gold. Thus, it expands the role of screen printing in packaging and decoration printing fields.

The process of packaging trademark screen printing can basically be divided into four parts: pre-design, plate production, screen printing, and post-processing. Attention should be paid to the operation techniques of each process to ensure the printing quality.

Packaging is an important means for protecting goods, anti-counterfeiting, storage, and transportation. Nowadays, most goods must go through packaging before being sold. Packaging is the first impression people leave on the goods. When consumers purchase packaged goods, they often do not focus on the intrinsic quality of the goods, but make choices based on the information and appearance provided by the packaging. Since most manufacturers do not have the ability to design packaging and trademarks, therefore, designers and business personnel should closely cooperate and actively help customers design packaging that is rich in new technologies and novel features. Through the creativity and individuality of packaging design, the novelty and high quality, high grade of the products can be fully displayed, and the advantages of the technical skills can be fully utilized to win customers. To fully utilize the role of design and technology development institutions, the goal of forming a profit-sharing community with the factory should be achieved.

At present, many packaging trademark printing manufacturers have their own design and technology development institutions. In packaging trademark design, the excellent designers must be familiar with plate making and printing processes and also be familiar with the process technology of post-processing. They must know whether the packaging works they design meet the plate making and printing processes and ultimately achieve the purpose of packaging. For the design of general packaging trademarks, it is required to be simple and clear, suitable for medium printing. It is not necessary to only maintain one's own design style and not consider the difficulty of post-processing, causing unnecessary economic losses to the enterprise. At the same time, due to the high processing difficulty and relatively poor product technicians, the expected effect of the design may be lost. For example, a trademark, if the distance around the pattern from the finished size is too close, often due to paper deformation, cutter precision, and other factors, the die-cut finished product will be skewed and the error will be too large, resulting in the product being scrapped. Therefore, enterprises should, on the basis of constantly summarizing experience and lessons, need to appropriately change the design to adapt to the requirements of the printing process after printing. For some high-end packaging or products with special design requirements, during the post-processing of printing, it is necessary to organize experts to tackle problems, using advanced technology to meet the requirements of customers and designers. In addition, designers and technical developers should be adept at leveraging the unique features and strengths of the enterprise's technical processes, actively guiding manufacturers, and making every effort to transplant these technologically advanced processes from design to packaging printing. This not only increases the added value of packaging printing but also shortens the production cycle, allowing the full utilization of the technical expertise, thereby attracting more printing business.

Printing process of packaging trademarks

The printing process of packaging trademarks involves transforming the design draft through plate-making, printing, and post-processing techniques to achieve mass replication production. Due to the completely different printing and usage materials of packaging trademarks compared to those of general books and periodicals, when designing packaging trademarks using screen printing, it is necessary to fully consider the characteristics of the usage materials and printing techniques of the trademarks.

Printing paper

Different packaging trademark printing tasks require different varieties and specifications of paper. Often, dozens of different varieties and thicknesses of paper need to be stored. Such as single-sided coated paper, single-sided offset paper, single-sided coated card paper, coated paper with glue, glass powder-coated card paper, white base paper, gold base paper, aluminum foil paper, and kraft white base paper, with common thicknesses of 80g, 90g, 250g, 300g, 350g, 400g, 450g, etc.

Furthermore, for different businesses, there are different requirements for paper and usage operation techniques. For example, for bottle wine trademarks, since it is a mechanized labeling process with high speed, once the backside is automatically coated with glue and gets wet, it will instantly deform and bend. The bending direction of the paper must match the automatic labeling machine, otherwise, it will not be possible to carry out production on the automatic assembly line. Therefore, to meet the needs of different customers, when arranging and combining layouts for packaging trademark printing, the paper orientation and vertical/horizontal arrangement must be considered first. If the main produced trademarks do not meet the requirements of the customer's orientation and vertical/horizontal arrangement, the entire batch of products will be scrapped.

Combination

The significant feature that distinguishes packaging trademark printing from book printing is the multi-combination of one layout with multiple images. There are as few as two images combined, or as many as dozens of images. How many images to combine for printing is a matter that design and technology need to consider. Mainly, the following aspects should be taken into account.

1. The difficulty of post-processing. If a draft has many processing procedures, it is necessary to carefully consider not making the printing layout too large. Otherwise, due to poor temperature and humidity control in the printing workshop, the paper may expand, making it difficult for the subsequent processes such as aluminum stamping and embossing to be accurately aligned. If the original aluminum stamping and embossing cannot be done in one go, it will be necessary to do it several times. Moreover, with many combined images and paper deformation, it will seriously affect registration and be difficult to remedy.

2. Special-shaped trademarks. Trademark labels are generally not very large. For thin paper with special shapes that need die-cutting, do not combine too many images. Otherwise, due to the accuracy of the die-cutting plate production, it will affect the die-cutting quality.

3. Printing quantity. If the printing quantity is not large, do not combine too many images. Because if the layout is too large and the printing quantity is small, the cost of the imitation plate will be high, inevitably increasing the cost of each trademark.

4. Paper size. The size of packaging paper matches the size of the paper, so the printing paper is very standard and there is no waste problem. However, packaging trademarks are different. Due to the influence of the size of the individual trademark, it is impossible to accurately combine them into 8-page, 4-page, or double-page printing. Therefore, whether to adopt the combination methods such as insert combination, horizontal and vertical combination, overlapping combination, one-time punching, or cutting out, should be based on the principle of minimizing printing paper usage. Choosing the right process combination method can directly generate profits for the enterprise.