Designing a Kiss Cut Sticker
Kiss cut sticker by Amanda Weedmark
You may be familiar with the classic cut stickers; Round ones, square ones, rectangle ones, and custom shaped ones. However, kiss cut stickers can sometimes be overlooked and an option to consider for your next project.
What is a kiss cut sticker?
Kiss cut stickers peel away from larger backing. The die used to trim them, “kisses” the liner instead of cutting through it like a die cut sticker.
More than one kiss cut sticker on a sheet, are called sticker sheets. Stamp books are a classic example of this.
In the end, both die cut and kiss cut stickers with the same design will look the exact same when applied. It’s just the presentation that’s different.
Benefits of kiss cut stickers
The larger backing area gives you an opportunity to include branding, barcodes, and a small hole for retail display in the area around your sticker.
I only recently started using kiss cut stickers after landing a distribution opportunity in Toronto, Canada. Kiss cut stickers were the perfect option to be able to include everything required to display in souvenir shops all over the country.
How to design kiss cut stickers
Begin with your final working size (aka retail display area) and work back from that. 3.75” x 4.75” is the size of my kiss cut stickers.
Figure out what elements you’d like, or need, to include on your backer card. Barcodes, font, and even logos will have minimal sizes that will have to be considered so start with those.
Consider adding some supporting graphics that won’t take away from your sticker, but will compliment it instead. This would be considered the background graphics.
Once you have all of that set, you now have an area to place your sticker. Include a dieline around the edge of the sticker in bright pink so the machine knows where to trim. Then ensure there is a small border that lands outside of the dieline to account for slight shifts in the trimming process. You wouldn’t want your background to be part of your sticker border!
Your file is now ready to send to the printer.
If you want to design a sticker sheet, the same rules apply. However, there will be additional requirements like a minimal sticker size and spacing between each sticker. These details will depend on the printer you’re using.
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