Creating Designs For Promotional Products

We see thousands of promotional products coming through our doors at Total Merchandise - all with impeccable logo designs that are professionally printed. The process of creating a promotional product can sometimes be a little tricky, so we're always happy to help with bits along the way, offering guidance and advice where you need it. A common problem when printing is getting the logo just right, with colours, sizes, cropping and more.

Size
Depending on your selection, your product will have a different sized area which can be printed on. Some products have only one place where they can be printed while others have multiple. All of our product listings have this sort of information listed, including a detailed description of the area that can be printed.

The Total Merchandise Marrow Mug listing.

Above we can see the listing for one of our best sellers – the popular Marrow Mug. You can see that the print area depends on the method of printing which is chosen. We'll cover a bit about printing processes a little bit later.

For the purpose of this example we'll use the 220x50mm size. That means that the area you can print in is 220 mm wide, by 50 mm high. Because of the size constraints you may wish to edit your logo to make it wider if it's already a tall logo. See our example below.

An example of a logo which could be edited to fit the print area better.

As we can see, this logo can easily be re-composed to fit a wide print area. If the original tall logo was used then it would have to be scaled down and printed small and narrow. Alternatively, different products may require a taller logo for which the original logo would be perfect.

Colour
If you've shopped around Total Merchandise at all then you may have noticed the range of printing methods available. We've got direct, 1 colour transfer, 2 colour transfer and engraving – just to name a few. Depending upon the printing method used your logo may be slightly different. A single colour print will (believe it or not) only be printed with one colour, so your logo will be visually similar to a silhouette. Most professional logo designers will keep this in mind, providing you with a single colour version for this purpose. Other printing methods, such as direct printing, will print in a similar way to your home colour printer, showing a full range of colours.

We match your colours using the Pantone system, this is a book of colours which ensures that every printer will print a single colour identically. Pantone made news recently when they introduced the colour “Minion Yellow” - based on the yellow skin colour of the 'Despicable Me' minions.

At Total Merchandise, we endeavour to make the printing process as simple and pain-free as possible. If you still have any unanswered questions, try our FAQ page or contact us.