Designing Your Printed Promotional Mugs

By Imogen Brown

As more and more businesses get into giving promotional items, simply choosing and distributing some promotional mugs isn't enough to stay competitive. These days you need to also make sure you choose an attractive design for your mugs-a design that will make the recipients want to use them for as long as possible. Beat out the competition by creating attractive and attention-getting designs for your promotional mugs.

Start by determining how much print area you have to work with on the style of mug you've chosen. You should be able to find this information easily, by checking the product specifications for the mug. It's also a good idea to find out if you can choose a full or partial wrap for your design. A full wrap means the design goes around the entire outside of the mug, including the area beneath the handle. A partial wrap means there is a small section of unprinted mug directly beneath the handle.

The first step to creating an effective and attractive design should be choosing any text you want to include on your mugs. Typically this will consist of at least your company name and logo. You may also wish to add some contact information or a slogan. If you're adding a slogan in addition to all of this other text, try to keep it simple-you do have a fairly large print area, but you don't want to create a cluttered effect by adding too much text. Choose a simple font, preferably a Sans Serif-style. Any text you add should be clear and easy to read, so overly-complicated fonts are typically not a good option, unless you are choosing a font that has some particular association with your company.

At this stage you'll want to start thinking about color. If you've already chosen the colors for your mugs, choose design colors that will look good with the mugs. Your color scheme should be the same as or similar to your company color scheme, if you have one, unless you have a very specific reason for choosing a bright full color design. Don't overuse color to the extent that you risk people overlooking the really important information-your company name and logo should be the focus of the design, not an addition to it.

If you're uncertain about how effective your design is, it's a good idea to get some input from colleagues or family and friends. You may even want to create two or three designs and then ask people which they prefer-your mugs should appeal to a variety of different people, so it's important to create a design that everyone will find attractive.

Perhaps the best advice for designing mugs and any other promotional item is that you should avoid rushing at any stage of the design process. Once your promotional mugs are printed you can't change the way they look, so it's definitely worthwhile taking as much time as you need to create an effective design.

Imogen Brown is the marketing manager for Clickpromogifts one of the UK's premier suppliers of promotional mugs and custom printed promotional mugs.