Vinyl Stickers in Full Colour

Our vinyl stickers are printed using 4-colour (CMYK) printing machines at up to 1440 dpi resolution, ensuring your stickers are of the highest print quality on the market. We use genuine manufacturer's inks that are UV stable up to 3 years, meaning your vinyl stickers can be used both indoor and outdoor.

Vinyl stickers are stronger, more durable, last longer and comes in many more varieties than the paper alternative. Contrary to public perception, vinyl stickers are also cheaper than paper ones. This is because paper adhesive needs to be treated (i.e. coated) before it can be printed on. Self-adhesive vinyl (which is a pvc material) is more versatile.

We use quality vinyl stock when printing onto self-adhesive vinyl, ensuring an excellent ink bond onto the surface of the sticker.

Printing Onto Self-Adhesive Vinyl

The printing industry has developed rapidly over recent years. Nowadays, most short-run full colour vinyl printing is printed digitally using wide-format inkjets. Large run orders are still screen-printed, since this is the most economical way of producing vinyl graphics 'en masse'.

Even within the short-run digital market there are several tehcnologies employed to print stickers. Spot colour printing is used for printing metallic and fluorescent stickers. It is also used when the artwork is made up of a limited number of spot colours and where opaque colours are required. The typical technology used for printing spot colour stickers is thermal transfer. This is where heat and pressure are used to 'weld' a colour resin to self-adhesive vinyl to form a bond. Full colour printing using CMYK inkjet printers is used when it is necessary to produce a sticker with a photographic image or shading, or simply where there are many different colours in the design.

Whatever method is used to print stickers, they all need to be cut out at the end of the process. Screen printers tend to square-cut the stickers since the outsourcing to a third party to produce a die-cut can often be quite expensive. Digital printing, however, is often more versatile since any shape can easily be cut by creating vector paths in the design that can be followed by the vnyl plotters.

After all the stickers have been cut out the tedious job of 'weeding' starts. Weeding is the process of removing the excess vinyl, leaving the stickers on the backing paper. Weeding can be difficult if the plotters have not applied enough pressure during the cutting process. However, if the knife pressure has been set correctly then weeding should be straightforward. It is during the weeding phase that some stickers can be accidentally pulled off the backing paper and thrown away with the rest of the excess vinyl. For this reason, most full-colour vinyl printers ensure that extras are always printed during the manufacture to avoid having to run the job again.

After all the vinyl has been weeded, the stickers are then cut down into sheets and packed, ready for despatch.