Lo-fi Sticker
Printing Guide
With a punky and playful aesthetic, our stickers are perfect for jazzing up packaging, giving away at art fairs or promoting your band. Using a transfer film process, they’re similar to Riso printing with each colour being layered one at a time.
We stock different sticker sizes, shapes and colours alongside a range of transfer film colours - including metallics and holographic! The registration is skewed and the resolution is low, producing happy accidents and scuzzy edges.
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Our lo-fi stickers are a new addition at Duplikat! We print fun stickers for our packaging and to give away free with orders. We always get asked about them, so decided to offer a sticker print service. The stickers are printed using thermal transfer ribbon and have a really similar vibe to Risograph - layers printed one colour at a time with a charming imperfection.
The sticker printer has a low output resolution, meaning designs have a nice DIY aesthetic with misaligned layers and scuzzy edges.
They’re a cheap way to promote your art practice, small business or band as they’re quick to print and have a hard wearing feel. The adhesive is permanent, so they won’t peel off easily once stuck down.
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You can order stickers directly online. Or request a quote if you need more than 1,000 stickers, or have a bespoke requirement that the form doesn’t cover. You can also drop us an email if you have further questions, or want to see samples before ordering.
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This is a tough one to answer! We’ve had stickers outside on a bike which lasted for a long time, but eventually succumbed to the rain… they’re not officially waterproof or lightfast, but do have a good shelf life for the price.
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As the transfer film is made from wax / resin, we don’t believe the stickers are recyclable but we’re trying to get more in-depth information on this from the manufacturer.
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Sticker artwork works the same way for Risograph and screen printing - the printer ‘reads’ the level of black in the file, so anything 100% will transfer to 100% colour. The sticker machine can replicate halftone effects and photographs, although at a very low resolution.
Artwork can be created any way you like - hand drawn and scanned in, drawn in Procreate or created in Illustrator. For printing, we need grayscale files set to the size of the sticker and the files can be PDF, JPG or PNG - download artwork templates here.
We need a separate files for each colour you want to print. For multiple designs within an order, you can send over a multi-page PDF.
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As the printer is over 20 years old and has a low resolution output, stickers will have imperfections such as misaligned colours, fuzzy edges, creases in the transfer ribbon and small areas of cracking in the colour.
We absolutely love the look of the lo-fi stickers, as they complement our main gig Riso printing super well! But if you’re looking for slick looking, UV-resistant, super clear or die cut shape stickers, we’d recommend using a dedicated digital sticker print studio instead.
We don’t offer refunds for custom stickers if you’re not happy with the result (unless we’ve made an error of course), so do make sure the style of sticker will suit your project before ordering.
As sticker printing can be full of surprises we may include extra goodies in your parcel such as misprints, overprints, or used transfer ribbon (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)
