How to print your own cannabis labels at home

You do not need a label printer, a design program, or a minimum order of a thousand units. You need a pack of blank sheets, an ordinary printer, and artwork that is the right size. Most of the difficulty is in that last part, and almost all of the wasted sheets come from two printer settings.

What you actually need

• Blank label sheets. Avery is the common brand and the one most templates are measured against. Store-brand and OnlineLabels sheets usually share the same grids, so a layout built for an Avery number normally fits them too.
• An inkjet or laser printer. Either works. Laser resists smudging and handles a jar that gets handled; inkjet gives richer color on a glossy sheet.
• Artwork at the right shape. Not a square image squeezed into a rectangle. More on this below, because it is the part that separates a label that looks bought from one that looks printed at home.

Pick the sheet before you pick the design

This is backwards from how most people do it and it is the single change that saves the most time. The shape of the label decides the composition. A 2" round jar lid has room for a name and almost nothing else. A 4" x 2" wrap has a middle third that faces the buyer and two ends that curl out of sight around the jar. Design first and you will spend the design twice.

Common choices, roughly in order of how often home growers reach for them:

• 2" round — jar lids. Twelve per sheet. The name and little else.
• 4" x 2" rectangle — jar wraps and pre-roll tubes. Room for a name plus a strip of information.
• 2" square — small mylar bags. Twelve per sheet.
• 2.625" x 1" address label — thirty per sheet, cheap, and the usual home for a compliance strip.

Every size, with its measurements and how many fit on a page, is on the sheets and die-lines page.

The two settings that ruin a page

Almost every wasted sheet comes from one of these, and both are in the print dialog rather than in the artwork.

• Scaling. "Fit to page" shrinks the artwork by a few percent to respect your printer’s unprintable margin. A few percent is invisible on a photo and fatal on a label sheet: every label drifts a little further off its die-line as you move down the page, and by the bottom row the artwork is halfway onto the backing. Print at 100%, actual size, scaling off.
• Paper type. Label sheets are thicker than copy paper. Set the media type to heavy or label stock. On an inkjet this also slows the feed, which stops the smearing people blame on the ink.

Print one page on plain paper first and hold it against a sheet of blanks up to a window. If the rectangles line up with the die cuts, you are ready. If they creep, your printer has its own margin and the calibration sheet will tell you by how much. That is one sheet of paper against a pack of blanks.

Why the artwork has to be drawn at the shape

A design made square and then squeezed into a 4" x 2" wrap does not just look stretched. The name lands in the wrong place. On a wrap, the readable third is the middle, so a name centered on the flat artwork ends up split across the curve with the first and last letters facing the shelf. On a round lid, the corners of a square design are simply gone, and whatever was in them went with it.

The fix is to compose for the shape from the start: name in the middle third of a wrap, pattern running out to the sides; name centered and large on a lid with nothing in the corners you need; small text on its own strip rather than crammed under a name that is already tight.

Bleed, and why your label has a white edge

Sheets are die cut before you print, and no printer feeds paper to within a hundredth of an inch every time. If the artwork stops exactly at the edge of the label, a tiny feed drift shows as a white sliver down one side. Bleed is artwork carried past the edge so the drift eats spare artwork instead of showing the backing.

A sixteenth of an inch is plenty on a home sheet. Keep anything you need to read — the name, the numbers — at least an eighth of an inch inside the edge, because the same drift that eats the bleed can clip a letter.

What to actually put on it

For a jar on your own shelf, less than you think. The strain name is the whole job. You already know what it is; the label exists so you know which jar, from across the room, six months later.

Worth adding if you keep records: harvest date and a batch or run number. Both are more useful than potency, which you probably do not have a lab number for. If you are writing a THC figure on a jar from an app estimate, you are writing a guess on a label, and the label will outlive your memory of that being a guess.

If you are giving it away, or selling it

The moment a jar leaves your house the rules change, and they change by state. Most legal states require a universal symbol at a minimum size, a warning statement, and potency from an actual test. The symbol is not the same shape everywhere — a triangle in one state, a diamond in another — and "universal" is doing no work in that phrase.

Home growing for yourself, in a state where that is legal, none of this applies. Know which of those two you are doing before you print a hundred of anything.

The short version

• Pick the sheet first. The shape decides the design.
• Print at 100%, scaling off, heavy paper setting.
• Test on plain paper against a blank sheet before you commit.
• Carry artwork past the edge, keep text an eighth of an inch inside it.
• On your own jars, the name is usually enough.