Pad printing or screen printing: how your logo gets onto a pen

Most buyers do not think about how the logo gets onto the pen until something about it disappoints them. The print looks thinner than the sample did. The blue is not the blue in the brand guide. The small type under the logo has gone soft at the edges. Nearly all of that traces back to one decision that gets made early and quietly, which is whether the run is pad printed or screen printed. We run both in house. They are not interchangeable.

01The two methods, briefly

Pad printing works from an etched plate. Your artwork is etched into a flat plate, the plate is flooded with ink, a blade wipes the surface clean so that ink stays only in the etched recesses, and a soft silicone pad comes down, picks that ink up and lays it onto the barrel. The pad is the whole trick. It is soft enough to deform around whatever shape it lands on.

Screen printing pushes ink through a fine mesh. The mesh is blocked everywhere except where your artwork is. A squeegee forces ink through the open area while the pen rotates underneath it, so the image is laid across the curve of the barrel in a single pass.

On paper the two would give you much the same result. On a pen they do not.

02What pad printing is good at

The etched plate holds detail that a mesh cannot. If your logo has hairlines, thin rules, a fine outline or a line of small type sitting under the mark, pad printing is the method that keeps those elements separate instead of letting them close up.

It also goes where screen printing cannot. The silicone pad conforms to shape, so it can print on the taper near the nose cone, on a cap top, on a clip and on the tighter curve at the end of a barrel. Anywhere the surface is not a simple even cylinder, pad printing is usually the answer.

Its weakness is the ink film. A pad lays down a small amount of ink. On a white or pale barrel that is fine. Put a light colour on a dark barrel and it can look washed out, because you are partly seeing the barrel through the ink. The fix is to print the same colour twice, and a second hit is a second pass.

03What screen printing is good at

Screen printing lays down a much thicker film of ink. That gives you denser colour and far better opacity, which is the entire reason white on a black barrel is a screen printing job rather than a pad printing one. If the artwork is a solid block of colour, or a large mark running along the length of the barrel, screen printing will give you the stronger result.

Its weakness is the mirror image of pad printing. A mesh has a practical limit on how fine an element it can hold open. Very small type can fill in and thin lines can break up. Screen printing also wants a reasonably even surface to roll against, so it is a barrel method rather than a clip or nose cone method.

04Laser engraving, for metal parts

Laser engraving is also done in-house, and it works differently from either of the above. Instead of adding ink, a laser marks the surface with heat, and that mark is permanent: it cannot rub off, fade or wear through the way a printed mark eventually can. The trade-off is colour. You get whatever the underlying material turns when it is marked, generally a burn tone or an etched contrast rather than your brand's exact colour.

That makes it a better fit for metal than for plastic, which is why it suits parts like the clip and nose cone on the Mojo 2.0 MECP, or a gift set's metal body, more than it suits a full colour barrel.

05The barrel decides more than the artwork does

This is the part that gets skipped. Buyers pick a pen, then send artwork, then ask what the print will look like. The order is backwards. The barrel narrows the method before anyone has opened your file.

• Solid opaque barrels are the easy case. Both methods work, so the artwork decides rather than the pen.
• Translucent barrels, such as the Klix TR or the 555, sit underneath the print and shift it. A mid blue printed on a translucent green barrel is not the mid blue you approved on screen. Opaque ink and a heavier deposit help, and that points at screen printing.
• Moulded grips, such as the chevron grip on the Mojo 2, cannot be printed across. Texture will not hold a clean edge, so the print area stops where the moulding starts. That is geometry rather than a policy and it is not worth arguing with.
• Metal clips and nose cones, as on the Mojo 2.0 MECP, are a different substrate to the plastic barrel. Ink behaves differently on them, and a clip is both small and curved, so if it is printed at all it is pad printed.
• Anodised parts, such as the cap panel on the Remax CCP or the barrel on the Remax CBCP, already carry their colour as the finish. Printing over an anodised surface fights the thing you were paying for.

The useful habit is to shortlist two or three barrels from the catalogue and raise the print question at the same time, rather than settling the pen first and treating decoration as a later step.

06Colour, and why matching it is a conversation

Pantone references were built for ink on paper. A pen barrel is coloured plastic, usually curved and sometimes translucent. Two things pull your colour away from the reference. One is the barrel underneath it. The other is how much ink the method actually puts down.

Screen printing gets closer to a solid brand colour on a dark or strongly coloured barrel, because there is more ink sitting between the eye and the plastic. Pad printing on that same barrel may need two passes of the same colour to reach a similar density.

Multi colour work is possible and we run it, but it helps to understand what you are buying. Each colour is a separate pass and each pass has to register against the one before it. Every additional colour adds cost and adds one more place for the print to end up slightly out of line. A one colour logo on a barrel chosen to suit it will almost always look better than a four colour logo forced onto the wrong barrel.

07Two more methods you may be quoted elsewhere

You may come across other decoration methods while you are collecting quotes. Knowing roughly what they are makes it easier to judge whether a competing offer is genuinely better or simply different. Whether either is available for your order is a question for the quote rather than something to assume from a website, including this one.

• UV digital printing is inkjet cured with ultraviolet light. There are no plates, so short runs cost less to set up, and it can carry full colour and photographic artwork. The ink sits on top of the surface as a raised film, and how well it stays there depends on what it was printed onto.
• Foil stamping presses metallic foil onto the surface with a heated die. It gives a genuine metallic finish that ink cannot reproduce. It is a one colour process and it wants a reasonably flat area to press against.

08What we need before anything gets printed

Send vector artwork as .ai, .eps or .pdf, with the type outlined. A JPEG or a PNG pulled off a website cannot be etched or screened cleanly at pen size, and rebuilding it costs time that would be better spent on the run. Tell us the colour reference you are working to, which barrel you are considering and whether the logo has to sit in a particular position.

We return a printed sample for approval before the run goes ahead. Approve the sample rather than the on screen proof, because the sample is the only version that shows you the ink on the actual plastic. The minimum for a printed run is 1,000 pieces, which we go into properly in our note on minimum order quantities.

If you already have a barrel in mind, send your artwork across and we will come back with a proof before anything is set up to run.

09The short version

• Pad printing for fine detail, curved surfaces and small print areas.
• Screen printing for coverage, dense colour and light ink on dark barrels.
• The barrel and the artwork decide together. Choosing the pen first is what causes most print disappointments.
• Every extra colour is another pass, another cost and another chance of misregistration.
• Send vector artwork and approve a physical sample.

If you already know the barrel and have the artwork ready, send it across and we will tell you which method the job wants.