Screen printing onto bottles - help for graphic designer

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designer
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Screen printing onto bottles - help for graphic designer

Post by designer »

Hi there,

I'm a graphic designer working with a client who produces skin care products. The packaging uses a few different print processes and materials. The one I am having trouble with at the moment is a screen print onto opaque plastic bottles.

BACKGROUND
The design is gold metallic text/logo (Pantone 871) on black boxes (Pantone Black 6) with a gold honeycomb pattern in the background. Please see photo attached.

ISSUE 1
The gold is appearing dull. I am told in this process the black has to be laid down first and then gold text overprinted (some of the text is pretty small). I thought with trapping we might be able to print the gold first and then overprint the black allowing the black to form the shape of the text? That would be the process in offset printing. Or another solution I thought might be to print an entire box of gold and then overprint the black?

ISSUE 2
Even if printed like I've suggested above, the gold may not be high enough in contrast to the black, so am thinking of changing the text/logo to be a yellow such as Pantone 129 or even white but am scared that if in this process the text absolutely has to be overprinted onto the black it's still not going to be very bright. Any thoughts?

ISSUE 3
I am told that registration will not be very tight and that a tolerance of 1mm is acceptable in this process. At the moment some of my "background" pattern is printed on the black which doesn't look great. They also tried to print a layer of white under the design to make the ink denser but you can see the white where the registration is out. Anyway, is 1mm tolerance for registration pretty standard for this process or should it be a bit better?

ISSUE 4
Some of the background pattern is missing altogether. The stroke point is 0.6pt at the smallest. Do I just need to make it thicker or is that a printing issue? (please see photo)

Thank you so so much for any help/advice/info anyone may be able to offer!!
Attachments
Sample of screen printing on bottle
Sample of screen printing on bottle
IMG_2371.jpg (218.18 KiB) Viewed 4111 times
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