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How Do I Make Bumper Stickers?
To make bumper stickers at home, you have to make sure you have two of the primary materials: bumper sticker papers and a printer. You can choose the shiny variety of the bumper sticker paper if you want the images and the colors to be vivid, but if you want your printed image to dry easily, go for the matte variety. These bumper sticker papers go best with an inkjet printer, which releases the ink by a spraying motion. This creates brighter colors and more accurate images. If you are planning to create big bumper stickers, make sure your printer can accommodate larger sheets of paper.
The first step is to create your design or the image you want on your bumper sticker. Some computer programs have a gallery of images you can use by copying and pasting the images together to create a unique picture. You can also manually draw your own design on paper, and then scan it on the computer to make bumper stickers. If you prefer words to images, you can also think of a slogan or a motto that will give people something to think about when they look at your bumper stickers. Make sure that your design is inside the paper border to ensure that every part of the design will be printed out properly.
Before printing out the design on the actual bumper sticker paper, you might want to make a “trial print” on standard paper. That way, you could look at how the design might look on actual paper. If you are using a designing software to make bumper stickers, there can also be an option where you can preview your design in its real size. After making certain adjustments and being sure of your design, you can now print them on the bumper sticker papers. After the papers go through the printer, give the paper some time for the ink to dry.
After the ink has dried, you can laminate the paper to make bumper stickers last through elements like the heat and rain. Bumper sticker papers are usually made to be weatherproof, but laminating it will make it last for a longer time. Feed the paper slowly to the laminating machine to prevent bubbles from forming. If you do not have a laminating machine, you can also use a shelf liner or an adhesive protector to make bumper stickers more durable, smoothing it over the paper slowly to minimize bubble formation. You can even paste the bumper sticker paper on a sheet of magnet to make for an easier transfer from bumper to bumper.
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Discussion Comments
@clintflint - If the bumper sticker is just for yourself though it's not as big of a deal.
Although if you don't want to go to the trouble of messing around trying to make your own bumper stickers, there are already a huge variety of options out there to choose from.
@KoiwiGal - The only thing is, if you're planning on selling bumper stickers then it's a good idea to make sure that your fonts and pictures are all free for commercial use.
Sometimes companies that customize bumper stickers will let you know if you shouldn't be using a particular image and sometimes they won't. But if you start selling them commercially and someone else owns the image it will often be found out and the person will have the right to sue you for damages.
If all you want is to get your idea onto some cheap bumper stickers then look for public domain images or sketch your own designs. As long as you can scan them in and convert them to a .jpg file you will be fine.
If you want to make a lot of bumper stickers I would recommend using a service rather than trying to make them yourself. It will probably end up being cheaper in the long run, as printer ink and bumper sticker paper are both fairly expensive.
There are a lot of companies that will print out bumper stickers with your choice of design and often they give discounts for bulk purchases as well.
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