The Printing Jazz You Need To Know!

Are you wanting some stickers but don't know what all these words mean? "Premium, Laminated, Weeded Vinyls" can sound confusing, and I do it all day! Here is the breakdown of different product and material types offered at Little Lemur Stickers, so you know what you're getting with your order; soon you'll be an expert too! If you want a custom sticker and don't see an option for it just reach out! I am happy to work on custom orders in all shapes and sizes.

Materials:
There are many producers of vinyl materials out there with varying ranges of quality. At Little Lemur Stickers I seek the BEST available and exclusively use their rolls for sticker printing. Using a wide format 30" printer, I can produce stickers on industry standard vinyl rolls, allowing for the selection of top quality materials. Each product uses a specific vinyl, chosen to give you the best result. 2-4mil extra thin vinyls for diaper panels, 6mil thick & stable vinyls for stickers that are more durable; even low-tack wall vinyls and special holographics are in stock and being tested regularly.

Custom Uploads:
Custom uploaded stickers are images you submit, and we turn them into delightful stickers. There are a range of custom stickers available, from diaper panels, to standard stickers. I suggest always submitting the maximum resolution available for printing. 300 DPI+ is great, my printer can go up to 1200 DPI so you can have very crisp images. Website image downloads are usually only 72 DPI and can come out fuzzy, if you print them rather small though (like a little sticker) It's usually a workable file.

Custom Stickers can be anything and come in a variety of sizes (2"-4"), they also come with Matte, Gloss or Holographic lamination options (read about lamination below). A popular choice for custom stickers are personalized telegram stickers to hand out to friends, though you can make most anything a sticker.

Custom Diaper Panels should fit within a general range of sizes, I have broken them down from small to xlarge. My sizing in no way dictates what panel goes on which diaper, you can put an XL panel on a small diaper if that makes you happy, I simply sized them to give folks more variety in the range of sizes their panels are available in. If you want to know if a panel will fit, try taping on a diaper and measuring the width of panel left showing, then get a sticker size that is wider than the exposed panel area.

The peeking style panels fit perfectly into this template of sizes and if you design your own custom panel I ask that you make it wide enough to use up the space provided, since you are paying for wide stickers. Smaller stickers cost less, as they use fewer materials to print.

Medium: 15.8"x4.5"
Large: 17.5"x5"
XLarge: 19"x5.5"

Standard VS Premium Vinyl:

These are the vinyl types used for Diaper Panels & Diaper Decal stickers, they are thinner as to not affect the feeling of the diaper when applied.

Standard Vinyl is 4mil (4 thousands of an inch) thick and is a white material. Standard Vinyl is often used for landing zone stickers where you want to cover a diaper design underneath, as well as for our standard sticker prints that don't always end up on a diaper.

Premium Vinyl is 2mil (2 thousands of an inch) thick and is a clear material. Premium Vinyl is great for decorating plain diapers with a sticker as it is super thin and does not affect the feeling of the diaper much. It also will show patterns through, but blends in very nicely with the diaper. Premium vinyl is used almost exclusively for landing zone diaper panels.

Laminating:
Lamination is the process of adding a layer of special laminate vinyl overtop your printed stickers. This makes the stickers UV resistant, thicker & more durable, meaning they can go on your bottle that you throw in the dishwasher and come out just fine! Lamination is reserved for custom printed application stickers, not stickers for diapers, as there is no need to make a diaper sticker last through years of wear. Lamination can be Matte, Glossy or Holographic; I find the matte gives stickers a nice texture, glossy is shiny and squeaky, as is holographic.

Die Cutting:

Die-Cutting is the process of cutting out your stickers to their specific shape. All stickers produced by Little Lemur use some form of die cutting, whether it's a full sticker cut-out, or just discreet rounded edges on diaper panel prints. 

a standard die-cut is when the vinyl is cut out and the spare material "weeded" (excess cut out vinyl is removed) leaving your stickers cut to shape, but on a paper backing that is cut into squares. A full die-cut is when the backing is also cut out, meaning your final sticker and the backing is in the fancy "die" shape of your sticker. A full die-cut takes longer and is harder on machine blades, but it's look for final stickers is very nice. Less expensive, but delivering equally nice final stickers is a simple die cut; leaving you with your pretty cut out sticker, simply on a square piece of paper instead of fully cut out.

Custom sticker printing is a bit more expensive than just standard stickers bought on shop. This is because I have to create a die-path for each custom sticker. Ordering a larger quantity of stickers will allow for more uploads, as I prefer to make at least 25-50 stickers for each path that is cut. This means when you buy a pack of 25 stickers you will only have 1 sticker upload available to print, but when buying a pack of 200 you will get 6 uploads! Stickers also discount based on quantity, so the price per sticker is less when buying in bulk.

I usually add a white stroke to the stickers by default (not diaper panels) since it looks nice and stickery, if you specifically don't want this just let me know in an order comment. I can make any path you want!