1970 Chevelle "BD" tire pressure details.

[firstgenaddict]

FWIW - the originals are printed on metalized Beer Bottle label stock which has some wet strength.
The printing process is flexo or direct impact using a flexible image plate to directly print onto the substrate - you can tell this by the "squish out" leaving the centers of the letters showing substrate and the edges looking heavy... this is from the printing plate touching the surface and pushing the ink away from the impressed area. When the plate draws back it leaves the "kiss".

Offset printing uses a printing plate to transfer the image to a carrier blanket and the blanket transfers the image to the substrate, - this process uses much less ink per sq inch and thus produces a much crisper image- it typically shows as tiny little dots under a loop - the number of dots per inch is the "screen" resolution.

I sold pulp, paper, paperboards, and ultimately printing 20+ years ago.

[ORIGLS6]

Something I worked on a few years back.

[ORIGLS6]

More.

[Michael J]

Originally Posted by firstgenaddict

FWIW - the originals are printed on metalized Beer Bottle label stock which has some wet strength.
The printing process is flexo or direct impact using a flexible image plate to directly print onto the substrate - you can tell this by the "squish out" leaving the centers of the letters showing substrate and the edges looking heavy... this is from the printing plate touching the surface and pushing the ink away from the impressed area. When the plate draws back it leaves the "kiss".

Hey man! Thank you for the material and printing specifics. The material details will help me when talking to printers and trying to find the appropriate sticker stock. And the printing description of "squish out" is spot on! The Squish makes targeting the correct font/size/weight just a touch harder. I'm currently not ambitious enough to fake flexo printing on offset... yet. Maybe there's a photoshop or Illustrator filter that could add some squish to vector output... worth thinking about.

I was an Art Director in NYC advertising agencies for many many MANY years and have done a lot of print. I'm **just** old enough to have experience photo-setting type at the start of my career. As such, the dirth of quality decals out there has sent me on this path. Here is a coolant label I did compared to a surviving original. (on second look, that is not the final version as I fixed the size of the date.)