How to Make Custom Die-Cut Stickers in Illustrator: Your Complete Guide

Making custom die-cut stickers is one of the trickiest things a designer can encounter. Stickers, unlike other printed products, often have an atypical shape that needs to be cut out without any mistakes. Fortunately, the artwork team at Printlab deals with sticker design daily and knows how to create an artwork file that is ready for printing.

Here’s the list of everything you will need to design perfect personalized stickers:

• Basic Knowledge of Vector Files
• Read our previous article on how to set up artwork to create stickers, where we talk about Bleed and Safety Margins
• Adobe Illustrator
• Vector Image for Your Future Stickers
• 20 Minutes of Your Spare Time

Using these tools and following our detailed instructions, you will get stickers you can send to your local printing services. Let’s start designing.

Step-By-Step Instruction for Creating Die-Cut Stickers in Adobe Illustrator:

1. Open your file in Adobe Illustrator, we are using the Gogoprint logo. Make sure it is a Vector, not a Raster Image.

2. Double-click on the outermost line to select the shape.

3. Go to “Edit” → “Copy”, or use a Shortcut Ctrl+C for Windows and Command+C for Mac.

4. Click the Arrow Button to unselect the shape, or simply double-click anywhere outside the Artboard to exit the selection mode.

4. Click the Arrow Button to unselect the shape, or simply double-click anywhere outside the Artboard to exit the selection mode.

5. Create a new layer, then Paste in Place on the new layer (Shift+Ctrl+V or Command+Shift+V for Mac).

6. Go to "Object" → "Path" → "Offset Path".

7. Now it is time to create margins. In the “Offset” line put the value of 0.3cm, tick the “Preview” box, and click OK. This step will make your artwork exactly 0.3 cm bigger than the original. You can add any other value depending on the desired outcome.

8. Next step is to change the Stroke color to “Spot Color”. Here, at Gogoprint, we recommend our customers to set name the Spot Color “Dieline” to avoid confusion and set it to C100%, M0%, Y0%, K0%. Here’s how to set the Spot Color:

• 1. Go to “Swatch"

2. Click “New Swatch”