Goal

The goal of this exer­cise is to develop the proper tech­nique for cre­at­ing a con­tour cut or die cut sticker.

Objective

The objec­tive of this exer­cise is design and pre­pare a solu­tion for print­ing and cutting.

Background Reading

• https://​www​.stick​er​mule​.com
• http://​blog​.jakprints​.com/​2​0​1​5​/​0​5​/​s​t​i​c​k​e​r​-​t​e​r​m​i​n​o​l​o​g​y​.​h​tml
• https://​www​.jakprints​.com/​f​u​l​l​-​c​o​l​o​r​-​s​t​i​c​k​e​r​s​.​h​tml
• https://​www​.red​bub​ble​.com/​s​h​o​p​/​s​t​i​c​k​ers
• https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​o​0​4​F​K​4​w​_​Mso

Exercise

Con­tour cuts are usu­ally used on short term dig­i­tal print­ing and cut­ting on a vinyl cut­ter. Die lies are often used for paper and card­board, as well as vinyl, and oper­ate sim­i­lar to a cookie cut­ter. Set­ting up a dig­i­tal file for either is sim­ply done in a vec­tor based pro­gram by cre­at­ing a sim­ple com­plete path.

Part One

Choose a sim­ple icon, type as image, shape or illus­tra­tion to serve as the basis of the sticker. Please use the fol­low­ing guidelines:

1. Full color, all spots will be con­verted to CMYK
2. Mix of inter­nal and exter­nal curves or angles
3. No geo­met­ric shapes exclu­sively (ie only cir­cle, square, etc)
4. Text sizes should be no smaller than 10 points
5. Avoid bla­tant copy­right violations
6. Adhere to ORU’s Honor Code
7. Final size, includ­ing out­side cut, must be less than 3 in x 3 in

Part Two

Using the pro­vided tem­plate, cre­ate a work­ing file. Do any cre­ative work else­where and place a final ver­sion of the art­work appro­pri­ate layer. Flat­ten as nec­es­sary and gen­er­ate an off­set path or series of paths to cre­ate the nec­es­sary out­line between ¹⁄₈ to ¹⁄₄ inch. Place the con­tour path on the appro­pri­ate layer. Out­line any fonts. Save the file replac­ing “xyz” with stu­dent initials.

Zip the par­ent folder of file, and any nec­es­sary sup­port­ing images, and sub­mit to the appro­pri­ate D2L dropbox.

• The fol­low­ing rubric posted on D2L will deter­mine exer­cise score: Exer­cise Grading

Techniques

Pathfinder tools, off­set path, layer control

Supplies

print­able vinyl, large for­mat printer, vinyl cutter