Design Your Own Beverage Can: Things To Consider
Why Custom Can Design Matters For Beverage Brands
First impressions make a big difference, especially when it comes to purchasing decisions. Customers looking at all the different brands and cans on a shelf can’t be swayed by clever ads or positive reviews — but can design and branding can make a big difference. Cans featuring high-quality, eye-catching visuals set themselves apart, especially on crowded shelves. However, visual design isn’t the only part of a well-designed can. Ensuring important text, including your brand name and required nutritional and ingredients information, is easy to find and read is also crucial for success.
Finding the right combination of style and readability can be a challenge, which is why it’s important to prioritize these design decisions early in the process, long before production begins.
Let’s dive into a few aspects that you should keep in mind, including brand unity, printing capabilities and the overall consumer experience.
Branding Concepts That Shape Your Can Design
While your products may already be known for their quality, it still takes thoughtful planning and smart decision making to grow your on-shelf brand with everyday consumers. Everything from the imagery to the color pallet, typography, tactile elements and overall aesthetic contribute to creating a brand identity, so each detail is important to get right.
For instance, if you have multiple products with different varieties or flavors, customers should be able to immediately tell that the products are different while still recognizing your overall brand. Whether it’s varying colors, tint or other design elements, creating a distinctive and cohesive brand concept to the shelf will go a long way towards setting your products apart from the competition.
During the design iteration process, outside perspectives are key. Whether that comes from competitive review cycles or soliciting consumer feedback, knowing how your branding will be received is a distinct advantage before finalizing your designs and beginning the printing process.
Leveraging Digital Can Printing
Digital can printing offers plenty of benefits for creating memorable and impactful designs, especially with the breadth of options and adaptability the process provides.
Design Flexibility and Print Capabilities
Digital printing is one of the most versatile and powerful options available for getting your designs on cans, in terms of both scale and quality. Digital printing makes it easy to go through rapid design iterations, short product runs and seasonal or limited-edition can designs. This process also allows for highly detailed and thoughtful design choices, including gradients, tactile embellishments, color matching, minute details and full-wrap artwork.
The wide-ranging design and production capabilities of digital printing open up nearly limitless possibilities, but that also means that in order to remain efficient, it is important to appropriately balance the design, the production and the customer experience. This will help reduce revisions and ensure you still have high-quality designs that appear on the shelves.
File Setup and Production Readiness
To streamline the iteration process and cut down on rework, it is important that your designs are set up for success. Align your designs with the printers early in the process and throughout the evolution of your can design. Collaboration is key to minimize delays and gives both sides the opportunity to establish checkpoints along the way to ensure your products are ready for launch according to schedule.
High-quality digital can art printers, like Aluminate, have specific requirements regarding the resolution, color mode, templates and other aspects of your design. For submissions to Aluminate, art files need to be specifically sized, in CMYK color mode and between 300-600 ppi. Bleed is not necessary. Contact us to receive a free artwork preparation guide.
Quality and Consumer Experience
Tactile and Functional Design Elements
Design is more than attractive artwork. Good design means creating cans that enhance the consumer experience, as well as grab their attention. The finishes, coatings and textures that you choose can give your cans a high-quality feel and improve the condensation handling and usability. For instance, embossed logos, images or lines can heighten tactile interactions, or you can use these embellishments to create Braille text and increase accessibility. Similarly, a distinctive surface, combined with your visual design, can reinforce your brand and help set it apart in real-world, on-shelf settings.
Legibility and Real World Use Conditions
It’s one thing to be able to search for and find your brand name on the shelf, but that isn’t the only place your cans will be. More than likely, they will end up in low-light environments like bars or restaurants, outdoor events and other settings that can make reading difficult, especially with subpar typography. Even issues like glare, condensation and wet conditions can make cans difficult to read. To ensure your design has text that is large enough and high-contrast enough to be read in these lower light environments, go through test runs before full production begins.
Proofing and Production Quality Control
Thorough quality assessments may not be the most exciting part of can design, but it is vital to include it in your timelines and budgets in order to ensure your cans and designs are exactly what you want them to be. Accurate proofing is an essential part of this process for meeting both your color and finish expectations. Skipping this step could lead to production runs of cans that have incorrect color schemes, bleed, misaligned design elements or other inaccuracies that can minimize the effectiveness of your can designs.
Bringing Your Can Design to Market With Confidence
Thoughtful brand strategy, high-quality digital printing and quality decisions rooted in the consumers’ point-of-view are all key aspects of creating cans that balance aesthetics with performance and consumer experience. You also need an experienced, highly collaborative printing partner. If you’re ready to get your design on cans that elevate your brand, reach out to Aluminate. Our expert guidance, end-to-end support and premium digital can printing technology can help you shine a spotlight on your products.
