An ornament is the strangest surface in promotional printing. It is curved, it rotates freely on a thread, it is lit from odd angles by tree lights, and it is looked at from about three feet by somebody standing still.

Artwork designed flat on a screen ignores all four of those facts.

Nothing has a front

A hanging ornament spins. Whatever you put on the ‘front’ will be facing the wall half the time, which is why a single-panel design on a round ornament is a coin flip.

Full wrap solves it: the design continues around the whole circumference so there is no dead side. It costs the same and it is the single most useful thing to specify.

Design for the seam, because there is always one

A wrap has to meet itself. A repeating pattern, a band, or a design that fades toward the meeting point all handle that gracefully. A single large photograph does not — it meets itself in a hard edge somewhere.

We lay out the wrap for you free and show exactly where the join falls, which is usually the moment somebody adjusts the artwork slightly.

Curvature eats the edges

On a sphere, anything near the outer edge of the visible face is foreshortened and distorted. Keep critical elements — the logo, a name, a date — in the central band around the widest point.

Type running vertically up a curved surface is unreadable. Keep text horizontal and on the equator.

Size type for three feet, not three inches

A logo that reads at arm’s length on a screen disappears on a 3 inch bauble across a room. As a rule of thumb, whatever size you think the mark should be, go one step larger and simplify one level.

Fine hairlines and small taglines are the first casualties on every material here except acrylic. On engraved wood and die-struck metal they need thickening, and we will tell you where before anything is cut.

Colour against a lit tree

An ornament is usually seen against dark green with small warm lights behind it. Mid-tone colours vanish into that. Strong contrast — near-white, deep saturated colour, bright metal — is what reads.

Glitter and mirrored finishes exist for exactly this reason: they catch the tree lights instead of competing with them.

What to send us

Vector artwork if you have it, the largest photograph you have if it is photographic, and your PMS references. We will lay out the wrap or the cut path, thicken anything too fine, and show it at actual size on the actual material before a single piece is made.