At Rose City Label, we love helping our customers get the best results from their label designs—both visually and financially. When it comes to flexographic printing, a few smart design adjustments can make your artwork more efficient and cost-effective to print.
This post is the first in our series on making label designs flexo-friendly. Today’s focus is on reducing color complexity and improving print registration.
Why Simplify Colors?
Flexographic printing uses individual plates and stations for each color, so every additional color adds time, cost, and complexity. The fewer colors required to create a specific tone, the better your label will run on a flexo press.
Example: Adjusting a Red Color Build
Let’s say you have a red area in your design that’s built using all four CMYK colors—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. While this may look fine digitally, it’s not ideal for flexo printing because:
- More colors = more risk of misregistration (colors not lining up perfectly)
- More complexity = higher setup time and cost
Here’s how we make it better:
- Start by identifying the key colors.
For red, we know magenta and yellow are essential.
Cyan and black are often used to darken the tone, but they aren’t always necessary. For your color, look at which colors use the largest percentages of CMY or K. Colors with low percentages are more likely to be able to be successfully removed and compensated for. - Remove unnecessary components.
- Try removing black first. If the color becomes too light, that’s okay—we’ll compensate later.
- Increase cyan in order to compensate for the lack of black.
- Adjust remaining values.
- Increase magenta and yellow to deepen the red.
- Increase magenta and yellow to deepen the red.
- Result:
You now have a red that’s built from just two or three colors—a huge improvement for flexo production. If it looks similar enough to what you want, it’ll help us out. If not? Maybe try looking at different low percentage color (removing Cyan for example, and compensating with black). It will print more clearly and consistently, and it sets up faster on press.
What About Small Text?
Even if you simplify large areas, fine type—like government warnings or ingredient text—can still be a challenge.
When small text is built from multiple colors, any slight misalignment can make it:
- Blurry
- Unreadable
- The wrong color entirely
A Simple Fix:
Ask your designer or prepress partner if you can change fine print to black only. This single-color solution:
- Removes all registration risk
- Prints clearly over other colors (like yellow)
- Ensures legibility, especially in small fonts
The Payoff
By reducing the number of colors used in large areas and simplifying your fine text, your label design becomes much more flexo-friendly. That means:
- Faster press setup
- Lower production costs
- Cleaner, more reliable results
Want to see how this looks in action?
Watch the video below to follow a real-world example of optimizing a label for flexo printing. Our team walks you through the process, showing before-and-after adjustments in real design files.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the series, where we’ll examine grading two Pantone colors together to simulate the look of a CMYK gradient.
Need help adjusting your design for flexo?
We’re here to guide you through it. Contact us at https://labelprintingportland.com/