Custom printed paper and PET cups
How your own design goes onto the cup: flexo work in as many as four inks, what the artwork file has to contain, which parts of the wall stay clear of the design, and how a proof is approved before a run starts.
Custom printed paper cups are what most buyers are really shopping for. The shell is the one object in a takeaway order that a customer picks up and carries down a street, which turns packaging into advertising. This page sets out how the decoration is produced, what your design file must contain, which parts of the wall take no artwork, and what happens between your drawing arriving and a press starting.
Flexography and the number of inks
Decoration is applied by flexographic press. Every ink in a design needs a photopolymer plate of its own, and the plates lay their colour onto the flat blank one station after another before the shell is formed, so the number of inks in your artwork is the single figure that governs how much preparation a job carries. Up to four are available on the articles that hold a printing specification, among them the single-wall and double-wall hot sizes, the coated cold shells, the soup cups and both popcorn boxes.
A design in two flat inks reaches the press sooner and with less set-up than a four-ink one, simply because fewer plates are cut and fewer stations have to hold register. The process also has preferences. Solid blocks, line work, clean type and defined spot colours reproduce faithfully, while soft photographic shading and long tonal fades do not. If your marque exists only as a photograph, have it rebuilt as vector shapes with named colours first.
What a print-ready file has to contain
Send vector artwork with every typeface converted to outlines and every colour named rather than described in words. Lay the design on the flat blank of the article you have chosen, at actual size; ask for that drawing and it comes back for the exact size; no two are the same shape. A cup wall is a cone, which means its flat form is an arc and not a rectangle, and a line of type set on a straight baseline in your layout will ride uphill on the finished shell unless it was drawn on the curve to begin with.
Two bands stay outside the design. The strip immediately below the mouth is rolled to form the rim and takes no ink, and a margin at the foot is where the base disc is seamed into the wall. There is a vertical overlap as well, where the two ends of the blank are joined, so a pattern meant to run right around the shell has to be planned across that join. How much room all this leaves changes from article to article: the 8 oz narrows from an 80 mm mouth to a 57 mm base across 87.5 mm of height, while the 12 oz falls from the same mouth to 51.5 mm across 118 mm. Identical rims, noticeably different panels.
Proof, approval and the file after the run
Nothing goes on press until you approve a layout. You receive the design positioned on the flattened blank with the measured panel marked around it, and it repays reading as a proof, not a picture: spelling, legal wording, barcodes, the volume marking and the behaviour of the artwork across the join are all settled at this point. Colour is what travels worst on a screen, so quote reference codes for the shades your identity depends on and they are matched at the press instead of guessed from a PDF.
Approved artwork is filed under the article name together with the plates cut for it. A repeat purchase then reproduces the earlier run without fresh preparation, which is a practical argument for staying on one size across seasons. Tell us whenever a design has moved, however small the change appears; a revised address line or a redrawn symbol still means a new plate for the ink it sits in. Seasonal versions count as separate artworks and are quoted side by side on one offer.
Printed shells against plain stock
Undecorated articles are the faster road. They carry no artwork stage, no plate preparation and no approval loop, which suits a wholesaler moving volume under nobody's name in particular. Printing adds those steps and generally lifts the workable quantity for the article, because a press has to be worth setting up. Between the two, the real question is whether your packaging is doing any selling for you: for a coffee chain or a roastery it plainly is; for a bulk water service it may not be. Send the article names, the quantity against each, how many inks the design needs and the country the goods have to reach. The written reply comes back with the printable panel, the ink count, the packing and the schedule for that specification.