White Ink On Clear Decals

Hello, I’m John Fischer from StickerGiant and today we are going to talk about white ink on clear decals. There are three ways to use white ink on a clear decal; the first is to back up just the artwork itself in white ink, allowing no white ink to show on the finished product. The second involves flooding the entire decal white making it look like a white decal, and the third is to create a white halo around the artwork itself. There is two reasons for using white ink, the first is to increase the inks opacity. The ink will look transparent without white. And the second is to help the color contrast and readability. Lets take a look at some examples. These first examples are clear decals that have no white backing at all. The printing quality is good, but the problem with clear decals is that the ink tends to look transparent. Without the white ink and depending on the background colors the logo and text may be hard to read. To show you how transparent one of these decals becomes here is an example that is flooded with yellow ink and has no white backing. When I hold up the product with a white backing, you can see the color difference in the yellow. When using white ink, one of the first options is to back up just the artwork itself in white, allowing no white to show through on the final sticker. You can see that in these examples the orange is nice and vibrant, the blue and the red are deep and rich, and that yellow and red really pop out. The problem is that sometimes, depending on the background the decals are placed against they can still be hard to read. In this second example of clear decals, we’ve backed up the entire piece of artwork with white ink, no clear is showing anywhere on the decals. These are easier to read, viewable from a distance, the ink color is opaque and they look great. In this last example, white ink not only backs up the artwork but it extends just past it, creating a halo like effect. The one in the upper left hand side is just white ink, no other colors were used. These decals are easy to read from a distance and the white ink does not interfere with the customer’s logo or message. All of the samples shown here today are shot on a interior piece of glass. If you were using a tinted window, perhaps in a automobile, the issues of white ink on a clear decal are that much more important. Hopefully this will help you understand white ink on clear decals.