How to use safety to ensure even borders

The label on the left was printed with the artwork all within the safety zone. It has a nice, even border. The label on the right was printed with the artwork set up too close to the trim edge, resulting in an uneven border.

On the border

Hooray! You have designed a beautiful label for your home brew and you’ve got it looking exactly the way you want it, down to your exquisite and precisely aligned border. So you order some labels and you hear a worrisome reply — something to the effect of, “we need more safety”.

What the heck? you might be thinking. We sympathize.

Play it safe

Safety just refers to the practice of keeping all your important elements — borders, logos, text, etc — a safe distance from the trim edge. For our purposes today, let’s focus on how you can use this practice to ensure a beautiful and even border on your labels.

While we do everything we can to ensure a beautiful and even trim on all our labels, printing and cutting is still a mechanical process where things move around. When label art elements fall outside the safety zone they are more likely to be out of alignment and may even get cut off altogether.

Rest assured that if your art does fall out of safety, in most cases we can take care of this on our end so you won’t even have to hear about it. However, sometimes we actually need you or your designer to adjust the art. That’s when you might get a request for more safety.

So let’s get all our important elements into the safety zone! This means making sure all your text, logos, barcodes and especially border edges are a safe distance from the trim edge.

What to do

Keep all important elements at least 3/32″ or .09375″ from the trim edge of your label art. This will help ensure that nothing gets cut off that isn’t supposed to and also help keep any borders nice and even all the way around.
Tell your designer about this important specification.
When placing your order, use our Personalization tool to ensure your art fits within our safety zone.

Use our tool

When you order labels from Evermine, we make it easy for you to see if all your important elements and borders are within the safety zone. This is represented by the dashed orange line on our Personalization page, shown below.

Different shapes

Safety isn’t just an issue with odd or custom shapes. Each shape has its own safety zone.

The above examples all have adequate safety. These will print well with even-looking borders.

Notice how these examples are all outside the safety zone. If we were to print these as-is the resulting labels would have noticeably uneven-looking borders.

Working with a designer?

Send them our spec sheet for the smoothest ordering, fastest turnaround and best printed outcomes on your label order.

David Hamma (3 Posts)

David is Production Manager and designer at Evermine Labels. Husband, father, musician and letter enthusiast, he can sometimes be found playing guitar with Moon Debris or prowling the typography section of Powell's. Favorite beverage: earl grey. Pictured is his kitty, Chilton.