AZAR SAYAN's Print Guides

In order to have a good artwork for your cups, a graphic designer needs to notice the following points:

1. If your design contains barcodes, it should be vertical. It means that you’re the bars should be printed horizontal on the cup; because the barcode scanner is conical not flat, it will be helpful to read the barcode.
2. Try to put texts with small type face at the middle of the design. Since all such machines consider the conical cups as cylindrical ones, they add slight tram shadows on top and bottom of the cups. One reason that the barcodes should be printed horizontally is that vertical bars become wider at the top and bottom; the more the taper of the cup, the wider are the bars. Therefore, if you want a good print, you should put your important elements in the middle of the artwork.
3. For calculating width of the plate, calculate the circumference of two third of the cup from the bottom as shown on the below image.


Calculation of Plate width of a Cup Printer

4. If it is supposed to print entire length of cup and 2 prints ends meet each other, the graphic designer needs to design the artwork in a way that if you cut 5 mm from the ends, it would not be affected that much. In this case, noticing ink overlap from the ends, the operator can solve this problem with cutting the rubber blanket.
5. For designing the artwork, the graphic designer needs to have the dimensions of the plate. The dimensions are provided in a drawing from the machine manufacturer.

Dimension of a Dry Offset Cup Printer Plate (Click for Larger Image)