You’re excited to see your beauty or skincare products with your logo printed, but then you finally get your products in hand, you realize your logo size and design doesn’t look as good as you thought. It’s either too complicated, too small, or simply the wrong color (oh no!).
So, how do you prevent that from happening? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, you’ll find some logo design best practices, including logo size guidelines, file types, key principles, and some printing options to consider to ensure your logo looks great when printed on any beauty or skincare product.
Here are the top 5 best practices for your logo to print beautifully on your products:
- Keep it simple: understand logo size and design basics
- Scalability: bold but simple
- Color: consider the background
- Saving and exporting your logo: file types and more
- Know your printing options
1. Keep it simple: understand logo size and design basics
Vector files
You want your logo to be eye-catching on beauty and skincare products. This means your logo should have bold lines and K.I.S.S. (Keep It Stupid Simple). Keeping your logo bold and simple also ensures that it still looks good on smaller, thinner beauty products like lip pencils or eyebrow pencils.
The more complex it is, the tougher it will be to have clear, beautiful print jobs. The left logo has got the principles right. Now, your logo can be printed on products with bold, dark lines. This practice will ensure your logo looks elevated and elegant in any color, too!
2. Scalability: bold yet simple
Beauty and skincare products can range from very small to quite large. On our larger eyeshadow palettes, the surface is an ideal size for your logo to look big and beautiful. On our smaller products, like lip pencils, that are thinner and have much less surface area, some logos are very hard to see.
There are a couple of things that you can do to make sure your logo will look great on all of our products, even the smallest ones!
Tip 1: Avoid thin lines
While plenty of thin strokes (or lines) might look great on a screen, thin lines don’t scale down very well making it difficult to see or read. A logo such as this one might look great on a larger bronzer product (left), but when printed on a matte lip stain, the text is no longer readable and the graphic is difficult to make out:
In contrast, this logo has thick lines and is much more clear on the lip stain:
Tip 2: Choose a bold font
Like with thin lines for graphics, choosing a font with thin strokes can make your logo hard to read at a small scale. For example, these two fonts are both legible at a large scale.
But put them on a lip pencil and the thin lines are very hard to read and almost non-existent.
Tip 3: Pick graphics with solid colors and shapes instead of outlines
It’s tempting to want to add a large complicated graphic to your logo, but for the best printing practices, it’s better to keep your graphics simple and clean. Opt for solid shapes instead of outlines.For example, this rocket illustration (below), is too complicated, and overpowers the text. When scaled down onto a smaller product the text will be unreadable.
This alternative below keeps the bold text as the main focus of the logo, and the graphic is a solid shape that will scale down well for all different print applications.
3. Color: solid is better
Consider the background
If you’re thinking about starting your own lip gloss line, think about all the colors and shimmers your product will have. Now, think about how your logo would look on multi-colored backgrounds.
If your logo is gold and silver, will it look good on a coral lip gloss tube? If your logo is purple and gold, will it be clear on a bright pink lip gloss product?
Avoid gradients
It can be tempting to add a gradient to your logo in an effort to make it stand out. However, gradients often look messy and can distract from the logo itself. Bold and simple solid colors are classic and will withstand the test of time.
Blanka Tip: Think about keeping your logo black and white for makeup products. You can’t go wrong with the classics.
4. Saving and exporting your logo
Vector files
Hold on! Before you send off your logo, ensure that your logo is a vector image and not a raster image. Not sure what a raster image is? Keep reading!
Vector vs. Raster
A vector image ensures that your logo can look great on any size beauty or skincare product without the risk of it looking low quality. This type of image is composed of points, lines, and curves that are based upon mathematical equations.
Meanwhile, a raster image is made up of geometric shapes, also known as pixels, and when you enlarge a raster logo image like a jpg, your logo will look unclear if you make it bigger than its original size.
On the other hand, your vector image logo will enlarge smoothly to any size you want so it will look great on lipstick caps, as well as a giant billboard.
How will a vector image benefit me?
You can scale the logo bigger or smaller while retaining the original dimensions and most importantly, quality.
What vector files are suitable for printing?
These are the 3 most common vector file types:
ai, .eps, svg
Most commonly, designers create logos in Adobe Illustrator, export it as svg or eps files for printing, or export as other formats such as png or jpg for digital uses like your website. A pretty straightforward process!
Pixels and logo size variations
Logo size dimensions are measured in pixels for digital needs and inches or millimeters for print. You’ll want to make sure your logo looks good both small and large, so consider the possible applications and how it will be displayed.
You’ll want to try to define minimum logo sizes as guidelines to ensure you can see everything clearly.
Some people have horizontal, square, and vertical versions of their logos. This can help you expand the products you want to print on with these logo size variations in hand. It’s important to note, each variation like this will count as a different logo if you are printing it, so keep that in mind when selecting your favorite!
Empty space in your logo
When exporting your logo, make sure that there is no empty space around your logo in the exported image. This is to make sure that we can scale your logo properly on our product images. In the example below, this image has been exported to be square even though the logo itself only takes up a small part of the space (image borders added for clarity). When placed onto a product, the logo will look much smaller due to all of the blank space.
Option 1 – Pad Printing
This option allows you to print on plastics with a glossy finish. Inkcups provide machines for at-home printing for your makeup products.
Option 2 – Digital UV Printing
Your logo can be digitally UV printed directly onto your beauty products, creating long-lasting durable printed private-label products. This is a very premium type of printing to make sure your logo looks incredible in all sizes.
Option 3 – Label Stickers
Use printers like QL-300 to print out your own labels or get stickers done by printing companies like, Moo.
Conclusion
Logo design best practices should be understood to make sure that your logo looks great on all your beautiful products. From logo size to file type to the key principles of bold strokes and keeping your logo simple, you’re now ready to private label your products!
Blanka Tip: Looking to have a logo designed for you? Blanka’s logo design services are here to help!
To keep things simple, Blanka provides makeup and skincare products for anyone to start private labeling under 30 minutes. If you have your logo ready to go, we’ll send you mockups to show you how your logo looks within a day. Sounds like a business you’re ready to try? Click the button below to get started.
