The official Colorado Avalanche colors are burgundy, blue, silver and black. The primary color is burgundy (#6F263D), paired with blue (#236192), silver (#A2AAAD) and black…
A label can look finished and still get rejected because the letters are a fraction of a millimeter too short. The FDA requires letters at…
Nobody at FDA signs off on a food label before it reaches a shelf. FDA does not pre-approve food labels (FDA Food Labeling Guide, 2013),…
Nobody can build a pack that a determined person won’t get into. What a designer can do is make sure the attempt shows. That is…
Plastic packaging does not automatically keep food fresh longer. WRAP ran an 18-month study in 2022 on apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumbers and potatoes, and it…
Pinterest uses Pinterest Sans, a custom sans-serif font commissioned from Swiss type foundry Grilli Type and introduced in 2021. The font was created as part…
Most packaging printers want the cut line as one closed vector path sitting on its own layer. It gets stroked in a spot color with…
A file either remembers shapes or it remembers pixels, and that is most of the vector versus raster question for print. Paths stay sharp at…
Etsy’s logo uses a custom serif wordmark that closely resembles Minister EF Book, a typeface originally designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. Etsy has…
The official Florida Panthers colors are red, navy blue and flat gold, with white as a support tone. The primary color is red (#C8102E), paired…
Most people have run a thumb over foil stamping without ever hearing the name. It’s the gold lettering on a business card, the title on…
Gmail uses Google Sans as its primary interface typeface, a proprietary geometric sans-serif font developed by Google’s in-house design team. For email composition, Gmail defaults…
Silver and gold inks are made with actual metal. Aluminum flakes give you silver, copper-zinc bronze gives you gold, and both bounce light back in…
Spot varnish covers part of the sheet and flood varnish covers all of it. Nearly everything else about the two follows from that. A logo…
Airbnb uses Airbnb Cereal, a custom sans-serif font commissioned specifically for the brand. Dalton Maag, a London-based type foundry, designed it in collaboration with Airbnb’s…
Embossing presses a design up into the material, and engraving cuts it away and leaves a recess. Cardstock and leather take embossing well, and so…
Adult Swim uses Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold for its logo, a neo-grotesque sans-serif font published by Linotype. The network adopted this typeface in 2003, when…
Spot UV coating puts a clear varnish on parts of a printed sheet and cures it under UV light. Those parts come out glossy, and…
Uber uses Uber Move, a custom sans-serif font commissioned specifically for the brand. MCKL type foundry designed Uber Move in collaboration with branding agency Wolff…
Print files get specified in inches and PPI, usually 300 PPI. Web and app files get specified in plain pixel dimensions, and nobody asks what…
Louis Vuitton uses Futura Medium, a geometric sans-serif font designed by Paul Renner and originally released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1927. The wordmark…
For work held at arm’s length, the default is 300 ppi at final size. The figure drops as viewing distance grows, which is how a…
Off-White uses Helvetica Bold as its core wordmark font, licensed from Linotype (now owned by Monotype). For its website and newer digital branding, Off-White commissioned…
Printers want a vector PDF first. EPS and AI sit right behind it. All three store a logo as paths and can carry CMYK or…
Soft hues transform brutal design into something people actually want to look at. Pastel color palettes strip away the aggression of saturated colors while maintaining…
MrBeast uses 3 distinct fonts across his brand: Obelix Pro for thumbnails, Third Rail (modified) for his logo, and Komika Axis for video subtitles. Obelix…
A printer’s raster image processor (RIP) never sees your screen. It reads the file and draws whatever is inside, and when layers or live transparency…
Most designs fail not because of bad typography or weak layout, but because the colors don’t work together. A well-built four color palette gives you…
Harley-Davidson uses Block Gothic RR Bold ExtraCond, a condensed sans-serif typeface published by Red Rooster Collection. The font was redrawn and produced by British typographer…
Most print jobs get their first look as a list of file names. Print file naming conventions are the agreed rules for which elements go…
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