Designers are great! They come up with all sorts of ideas for promoting companies that would look fantastic if they were possible. If you are in charge of designing a promotional mug for your company or your client, then pay attention to this article. It could save you a lot of time and embarrassment and even give you a few ideas for making your design look the best it can on a mug. Here you will learn about three very popular printing techniques along with their strengths and weaknesses.
Screen Printing: This is by far the oldest method of personalizing corporate mugs. The mugs are printed and then fire cured to so that your advertisement stays on your mugs. If you were to take a key to a freshly printed mug, the ink would scratch off very easily. Once the mug is cured, the ink is permanent. You can then take your key and scratch at your logo as long as you like. If will not scratch and it will not come off. Screen printing is not perfect, however. It takes a very professional printer to match the Pantone colours in your logo, for example. The ink changes colour when it is put in the kiln so it really takes experience and a little guess work to match the print colours to your pantone colours.
Another drawback of screen printing is that you are limited to ceramic inks. These are quite basic colors. You will not be able to achieve bright colors on dark mugs. You will also not get a bright pink or a fluorescent green screen printed onto a ceramic mug. The heat of curing would make it a dull color that bares little resemblance to the color your want. Fluorescent colors are best printed using dye-sub printing. You may also have heard dye-sub mugs referred to as photo mugs.
Dye-Sublimation Photo Mugs: Photo mugs are a brilliant invention. With dye-sublimation printing you can get the vibrant yellows and eye-squinting oranges. You can print bright colors onto dark backgrounds. You can even print in full color all the way around the surface of the mugs. Wow! Do you think these are the mugs for you? Well, unfortunately, they to have their negatives. Firstly, dye-sublimation printing can only be achieved on straight sided mugs such as Durham Mugs, Cambridge Mugs and a few new coffee mug styles such as the Deco Mug. If you want a curvy sided mug, you will need to choose a different printing method such as screen printing and or digital transfer printing. You will also not be able to print inside the mug as this involves digital transfers that need to be cured onto the mug at a much higher temperature than dye-sub mugs can withstand.
Digital Transfer Printing: Digital printing is not done as often as it used to be. It was the predecessor to photo mug printing and it is more expensive. That said, there are certain things that can only be done with digital transfer printing, With transfer printing, you can print inside the mugs or along the handle making your promotional mugs really stand out. Transfer printing does take a long time, however, so if you are in a hurry, you can forget it. Each transfer print needs to be carefully applied by hand. You could actually screen print about twenty mugs in the same time it take to apply a transfer.
Choosing the right print method for what you are trying to achieve can really make your promotion a success.
