Product Sizes 

Open a new Photoshop document with the dimensions for your chosen beverage container size. Ensure your resolution is set to at least 300 pixels per inch / 118.11 pixels per centimeter (example below) and CMYK colour instead of RGB colour.

CYMK colour differs from previous RGB-based assignments in this course, as we’ve mostly been concerned with developing designs for screens, which use Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) back lit subpixels to display all colours. RGB can produce a wide array of colours through Additive Colour Theory, which adds wavelengths of light to produce new colours. However, printing inks must utilize Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/Black (CMYK) to produce the same colours, as a printed object cannot emit it’s own light, and must reflect light through Subtractive Colour theory, which combines colours to take away reflected light. 

Once your new document is open, we need to create something called a “Trim Line” on our document, an important inclusion for any project that will eventually printed and trimmed by a machine. A Trim Line is a visual reminder for you to consider when adding elements to your design. This line is where your label should be cut. However, the key word there is “should”. Printers and slicers are not 100% accurate all the time, even the best industrial label machines (pictured below) will make slight errors when printing at scale. It’s a good rule of thumb to assume that +/- 0.125 inches / 0.3175 cm on all sides of your document could vary depending on the individual print. Therefore, we will add trim lines on all sides of your document. 

To add trim lines, go to View > Rulers (or CTRL+R), click and drag from the rulers to the edges of your document to create blue guides on all four sides. Next, change the size of the canvas, Image > Canvas Size, add 0.25 inches / 0.635 cm to the width and height numbers. (e.g. original size is 8.1” by 4.3”, canvas size should be changed to 8.35” by 4.55”). This should extend your document by 0.125” / 0.635 cm on all four sides, creating a small border around your document. You’ll want to fill the entire white space of your canvas with your background, don’t stop at the blue lines.

The trick is that you do NOT want important elements such as nutrition facts, UPC (barcode) or other aspects of your design to be within at least 0.125” of your blue trim lines, as again, they could be cut depending on how the label is processed. We call this padding in between the elements and the trim line a “safety” zone. It’s generally a good idea to add a bit more padding on top of this safety to ensure your design still has adequate breathing room after the trim line is cut.