Stamps Guidelines

Stamps are different then print media and so require different artwork preparation. Properly prepared artwork will ensure delivery of best quality stamp that makes perfect impression. Aside artwork it is important to keep in mind that stamp is a tool and result of usage of the tool depends on how well tool is being handles.

Before purchasing stamp please be sure you familiarize yourself with artwork requirement.

1. Line Weight – on paper you can have hair thin lines but when stamping you need to have a “body” that will emboss into material or transfer ink. More to say laser cut stamps can burn out all together when line thickness is too small. We require line to be at least 1mm thick at all parts of artwork. All fronts should be at least 14pt. For fonts please avoid usage of fonts that have thin lines in them. Best fronts for stamps are those that use uniform thickness. For example Arial or Tahoma bold will make better impressions then Times New Roman as times has thinner lines on letters and those little bridges will break or burn out.
2. Colors – stamps do not have colors, stamp is single body. All artwork submitted needs to be one BLACK only color. If submitted artwork has color we will either send it to artist  for processing which is additional paid service ( of course client will need approve any extra expanses) or we will try to process order to best of our interpretations. Note, if art submitted in color and art processing service was not selected we will not provide any support or warranty to that order as it is client’s responsibility to prepare artwork to our requirements. So to ensure best results please submit your art as black only ink. Shades are treated as color to, please make sure there no shades or grayscale images either  
3. Solid Body vs Outlines – solid body objects need significant force to press into material. This only applies to soap stamps though. Ink and Heat stamps react differently but for soap stamps it is recommended to convert all artwork to outlines or situates. This will make it easier to press into soap.
4. Pictures and Screenshots – photos of animals or plants are not good for machining. To produce stamp we need  actual artwork as flat or vector image. If picture of goat is submitted it can be printed on paper but it cannot be made into stamps without additional processing by artist.
5. Vector Garbage – all vector art needs to be submitted as outlines, no masks no strokes or other hidden element. If vectors are not clean we need to add art processing services and whats most important we need to guess how to edit your art to be same as you want.
   Here is part of artwork submitted by client as vector in PDF format.
   

To begin with this has colors while we need black and white only art, but whats more important when we switch to vector view (Crt+Y in Adobe Illustrator on Windows) this same picture will look completely different and not usable for machining at all.

Reason for seeing those bunch of lines is how file was build. Artist used vector shapes with rectangular color mask for gradient. To process this logo along will take quite bit of time on our end. We call those lines vector garbage as those are not needed for laser machines and they need to be removed.

This logo should be submitted in vector view as shown below. This file needed at least Art Processing Level 2 or Level 3 in order to put it on machine

6. Soap Size, Stamp Size, Soap Weight – For production of stamps, soap weight or media weight is irrelevant. Please submit all size requirements in Inches or Millimeters. As base reference we use width (left to right) and height will be scaled proportionally. If both side proportion are given we will use bigger most logical size to scale artwork and other size will be ignored. We measure actual artwork from side to size and not the size of the stamp base plate. Once artwork size is set we add stamp plate to it which will have little extra material. If stamp is more vertical, we inscribe it to size ordered by client. If soze ordered is too small example “Home Made Soap” in one line and size given is 1/2″ which way to small to fit we can increase size a little if we think it reasonable. If we have it increase size by a lot we might need to adjust costs as stamps priced by size.

7. Dead Space Trimming
If art sides proportions are not properly ordered this makes stamp to have too much empty space, we call it dead space as it is not needed in stamp, it does not serve any useful purpose and in fact it makes it harder to use stamp as base plate can touch material and leave waveiy impression. In orders like this we will automatically remove dead space. For example, order below was places as 2×2″ stamp. When width is set to 2″ the height is about 0.75″ and renaming area is not used and not needed. White box shows area as ordered by client and rounded bounding box shows how stamp body will be cut. So red dashed area will be removed during production.