Artwork that prints perfectly on a carton can fail on a bottle for reasons that have nothing to do with the design. Glass curves, carries a tint, has seams, and every decoration process cuts your file into tooling rather than reproducing it.
The 5 Checks Before You Send Anything
| Check | What to confirm | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Vector artwork | AI, EPS or PDF, with fonts converted to outlines. | Someone tracing your logo and guessing at the curves. |
| Named colours | Pantone references plus a physical sample where it matters. | A colour approved on paper that fires to a different shade. |
| Line weight | Every stroke thick enough to survive a mesh or a die. | Hairlines that print broken or vanish completely. |
| Panel and seam clearance | Your mark placed inside the printable area on the drawing. | A break running through your logo at the parting line. |
| Bleed and position | Where the artwork sits vertically and how far it wraps. | A design cropped by the shoulder or misplaced on the body. |
Why Glass Changes Your Colour
Your bottle is a filter. Standard flint carries a faint green in thick sections, extra-flint reads water-white, and amber changes everything printed over it.
Firing changes it again on ceramic processes, since pigments shift in the lehr. So approve colour on a fired sample on your own glass. SGSBOTTLE proofs artwork in Shandong, where 14 forming lines feed the same site, so what you sign is what your run produces.
Proofing happens on your own glass at the SGSBOTTLE site in Shandong, beside 14 forming lines.
How Each Process Reads Your File
A screen turns your artwork into open and blocked mesh, so it wants flat spot colours and clean edges. A decal prints the whole image at once, so it welcomes gradients and photographs.
A hot-stamping die is cut as a solid relief, so it takes shapes and refuses tone. And an embossing tool goes into steel, where depth, radius and draft all constrain what your letters can look like on a 500 ml (17 oz) body.
Marking Up a Proof So It Helps
Vague feedback costs a round of samples. Mark the proof itself: circle what is wrong, name the colour you expected, and state the dimension you want rather than saying a mark looks small.
Keep one signed physical sample as the reference. Every later run gets judged against that bottle, and a 750 ml (25 oz) sample in a drawer settles arguments that email cannot.
What Slows a Project Down Most
Three things, in order. Raster logos, because someone has to redraw them and you then approve a trace rather than your own mark. Colours named by description instead of by reference. And artwork placed without the drawing, so the panel and seams get discovered at proofing.
Sending all three correctly the first time is usually worth more to your timeline than any process choice. SGSBOTTLE issues the drawing with the panel and seams for glass from 14 lines in Shandong and Xuzhou, before artwork is placed.
What Goes on Your Enquiry
Vector artwork with fonts converted to paths, Pantone references, the panel and position you want, and the format in ml and oz. SGSBOTTLE comes back with a marked drawing, a proof on your own bottle and the minimum for your project.