How more than 40 flavour variants of an international drinks brand were made print-ready for bottle, PET, can and board.
The challenge
This brand’s new design leans heavily on detailed illustrations. On a glass bottle with a printed label, that looks superb. But the same design also has to work on can, on PET and on corrugated board. And that is where it gets difficult.
Every printing technique has its own limits: fine screens, gradients and levels of detail that print perfectly on one substrate disappear or fill in on another.
Without a technical translation, the same product looks different on shelf in each format. Or worse: the printer simply cannot run the file and the launch slips.
For this brand it involved more than 40 flavour variants, each of which had to appear on six pack formats, from glass bottle to tray. So every variant required not one technical preparation, but a separate one per substrate.
The approach
Why does a design made for bottle not simply work on can?
Cans are printed differently from labels, with different screens and tighter tolerances. Corrugated board absorbs ink in yet another way. A design passed straight through without adaptation produces unpredictable results. Every substrate demands its own technical preparation.
How do you make an illustration printable on can?
Not by stripping colours out of it. For can, our repro specialists rebuilt the image from the ground up, matched to the way cans are printed. The number of colours did not necessarily come down, the construction of the image changed.
We aligned each proposal directly with the client’s design agencies, before anything went into production. That kept the design recognisable and printable, without intermediaries slowing the feedback down.
How do you guarantee the same colour result on every material?
Colour management ran through everything. We matched colour profiles per material and per printer, delivered certified proofs as the reference, and analysed press samples to verify the result matched the approved proof. So the same blue appears on the bottle, the can and the outer case.
The impact
- One recognisable brand image across six pack formats and every material, from bottle to tray.
- First-time-right at the printer: no rejected files, no press downtime caused by unprintable designs.
- Faster launches, because the technical translation ran in parallel with the design track.
- The approach continues today across 1,200 artworks a year for this brand.
For reasons of confidentiality we do not name this client. We are happy to share more about this project in a personal conversation.
Discover our Print preparation and our approach to colour management and proofing.
