Washi Tape 101: A Sticky Situation
Looking for a cute packaging solution or a fun accent for scrapbooking and paper crafts? Washi at your service!
Washi tape is a light-weight masking tape originally popularized in Japan. It gained popularity with book crafters, but truly has a million uses, from gift wrapping to sewing (mark straight lines without leaving residue!) to even helping one of our employees cut perfectly straight bangs.
Our washi tape comes in 10m long rolls, and in several widths- 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 30mm, and 32mm (download the design templates here!) You can even get a customized label applied to the roll for extra presentation pizazz!
With many products, different designs have to be priced separately even if they're ordered at the same time. Not so with washi! As long as they're all the same width, you can split an order into multiple designs, making it a very cost-effective product.
Washi tape with silver foil! Foiling can be used alongside CMYK printing.
We also offer foiled washi! Foiling is a method of applying a thin metallic layer to create a design. The set-up requirements and timeframe are a little different for foiled tape, since the process is a bit different.
Washi Design Tips & Guidelines:
You can find templates for the different sizes of tape here!
CMYK (not foil)
1. Artwork ideally needs to be in vector (AI, for example) format or Photoshop/PSD. A super high quality png/tiff/jpg/pdf is okay too!
2. If using a raster file format (PSD, jpg, tiff etc), please design the artwork at 400dpi when it is at the finished size. (If it's vector, no need to worry about resolution since it's infinitely scalable!)
3. The repeat length for CMYK washi is 350mm. Make sure to pay attention to the ends of your artwork, since that's where the print will start over again.
4. The art needs a 1.5mm bleed on top and on bottom. For example, if you want 20mm washi tape, design it at 23mm. Our templates have bleed lines marked out, so that's the easiest way to go (just be sure to put your art on a separate layer than the lines!)
5. To be sure that the important parts of your design don't get cut off, we recommend keeping them all at least 1.5mm away from the cut line/3mm away from the outer bleed line. These lines are also marked in our template. No bleed of any sort is needed at the narrow edges of the tape, since the design will repeat.
Foil Washi Tape
1. The resolution, file types and bleed size are the same as for CMYK washi, but the repeat length is 250mm instead of 350mm.
2. Parts of the design that will be foiled need to be at least .15mm thick and need .3mm of breathing room between lines/foiled areas. When designing, try adding a 0.3mm stroke to the outside of your artwork that matches the background tone to give the foil enough space to print cleanly.
3. Please clearly mark which part of the design gets foil and what color foil you'd like (we have lots of options! Regular gold and silver have the fastest turn-around times.)