How to Prepare Artwork for Tall Boy Can Coolers (216 x 147 Dieline Explained)
Your graphic designer will ask two questions: how big and where is the seam. Here are the answers and everything they will ask afterwards.
The dieline
216mm wide x 147mm high, flat. Exactly. Not approximately.
That is the print area unrolled. It becomes a cylinder that wraps a 66mm can and stands 147mm up a 168mm tall boy.
The width is not arbitrary. A 66mm cylinder has a circumference of 207.35mm. The dieline is 216mm. The extra 8.65mm is seam allowance (7.5mm seam area). That is why you cannot take a 207mm wide artwork and expect it to land.
The three panels, which is the part nobody tells you
The dieline is divided into three panels of exactly 72mm: left, centre, right.
The centre panel is the front of the can.
This is the single most useful fact in this article, so here it is again in a way that will change what you draw. A person holding a tall boy sees about half the wrap at once and reads only the centre 72mm. That is 35% of the circumference. The other two panels exist, they matter, and almost nobody looks at them without deliberately turning the can.
Everything that must be understood goes in the centre 72mm. Logo, wordmark, beer name, the thing you want read across a bar. The left and right panels are for pattern, texture, illustration that continues, hop cones, waves, whatever your field is. They reward the person who turns it. They do not carry the message.
The failure mode is subtle and extremely common: artwork that is beautifully centred on the flat rectangle, which means the logo is centred on the front panel, which is correct, and then a second element is placed at what looks like a nice balanced distance on the flat file and lands on the seam. It looked balanced in Illustrator because you were looking at a rectangle. Nobody will ever see it as a rectangle again.
The specs, all of them
- Bleed: 3mm top and bottom only. Working artboard is 216 x 153. Do not bleed the width. The seam allowance is already inside the 216. If you supply 222 wide, your artwork rotates around the can and the seam lands somewhere you did not choose.
- Safe area: we recommend 8mm in from every edge. That is guidance, not a hard limit off the dieline. The panel rule matters more.
- Colour: CMYK. Convert before you send. If you send RGB we will convert it and your fluoro will go flat, and you will be sad, and it will be avoidable.
- Resolution: 300dpi at final size, or vector. Vector wins every time.
- Files: AI, EPS, print-ready PDF, layered PSD at size.
- Fonts: outline them. Or send them. Do not send a PDF with live fonts you do not own.
The seam
The seam runs centre-back by default, which is to say it falls at the outer edges of the flat file, where the left and right panels meet each other around the back.
Do not put your wordmark across it. Do not put a face across it. Do not put anything across it that a human eye will read as "broken."
If your artwork genuinely needs to wrap continuously, tell us and we rotate the dieline so the seam falls somewhere forgiving. Illustration and pattern wrap fine. Type does not.
The mistake everyone makes
You send the can label artwork.
A 500ml can label is roughly 200 x 120. The dieline is 216 x 147. Those are different shapes, not just different sizes. Scaling the label up to fit does two bad things: it goes soft if it is raster, and it distorts the proportion if you stretch rather than scale.
The correct move is to extend the artwork, not stretch it. Your designer adds more background, more pattern, more of whatever the field is, until it fills 216 x 147 properly. If the file is vector this takes ten minutes. If it is a flattened JPEG from an illustrator you no longer work with, it is a rebuild, and this is the moment you find out.
Go and find your vector files now. Not when you need them.
The other mistake
Designing for the flat rectangle instead of the cylinder.
A design that looks balanced flat can look wrong on a can, because you only ever see about half the wrap at once and only really read the centre 72mm panel, which is 35% of the circumference. The centre of the flat file is the front. The edges meet at the back.
Print a copy at 100%, tape it around a can, and look at it. This takes two minutes and catches nearly everything. If you have not done this, you have not checked your artwork, you have checked a rectangle.
Getting it checked
Send the file. We will put it on the dieline and send back a mockup on the actual shape before anything gets made.