Kraft and recycled stock: what changes

The colour problem

Printing on brown is printing on a coloured background, and CMYK inks are translucent. A blue printed on kraft comes out muddy, and there is no white ink in standard four-colour printing to correct it.

The designs that work on kraft are the ones that accept this: single-colour black or white, bold shapes, no photographs, no light tints.

Where kraft genuinely works

Packaging above all — carry bags, boxes, tags and wraps, where the material itself is part of the product experience and the brown is read as deliberate rather than cheap.

It also suits businesses whose positioning is craft, organic or artisanal, because the association is already there. It works badly for anything that needs to read as clinical, technical or premium in a polished sense.

Designing for it

Treat it as single-colour work and it becomes straightforward. Black on kraft is crisp and always works. White ink is possible on some processes but is a specialist job rather than standard four-colour printing.

If you need a photograph on kraft, the usual answer is to print it as a white-backed label applied to the kraft surface, which sidesteps the translucency problem entirely.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Choosing without seeing it

Paper and finish are difficult to judge from a screen, which is why the descriptions on each product say what a stock is best for, what it is poor for, and what it feels like in the hand rather than only listing a GSM figure.

If a decision genuinely hinges on the feel, order the smallest quantity first. On most products the minimum is 100 units, which costs very little against the risk of committing a full run to a stock that turns out wrong.