Silkscreen Printing for Safety Gloves & PPE

Why this pairing matters

Because photography, design and artwork, colour scanning, offset printing, lamination and silkscreen printing are all carried out in-house, a change to the silkscreen printing specification does not have to be negotiated across three suppliers. One purchase order covers the finished item, delivered ready for the safety gloves and PPE packing line.

In safety gloves and PPE, silkscreen printing is used for work of this kind:

• Opaque white base printed under colour on clear polyester labels
• Metallic gold and silver panels on hang tags and cartons
• Fluorescent high-visibility panels on safety and PPE printed matter
• Scratch-resistant marking on plastic components and rigid sheets

In this sector the printed set around the product usually includes the following, and Fotoset can supply all of it on one order rather than leaving the buyer to co-ordinate three suppliers:

• Folded header cards sized to the cuff width of the glove pair, punched for a euro hook or a round hang hole
• Hang tags carrying size, standard reference and performance levels, attached by string or plastic tack
• Retail barcode labels applied to the header or the polybag, plus carton barcodes for the outer
• A user information leaflet packed with every unit or every carton, as the standard requires

Working specification

Size and format range: From small labels to large-format sheets. Sheet size range confirmed against the specific screen bed at quotation. Board weight is usually 300 to 400 GSM for header cards that must carry the weight of a leather glove pair without bending at the hook.

Printing is by sheet-fed offset for process and spot colours, with silkscreen used where an opaque white, a metallic or a fluorescent is specified. Both processes are in the same building, so a combination job runs without moving the sheet.

• Screen preparation, mesh selection and stencil exposure in-house
• One colour per pass, with drying between passes
• Ink adhesion tested on the actual substrate before the production run

Board, film and finish

• Art and duplex board of all weights
• Polyester, polypropylene, PVC and clear films
• Laminated and varnished surfaces where ink adhesion must be tested first
• Rigid sheets and formed plastic parts

Lamination, die-cutting and screen work are in-house, so a specification that combines an offset base with a silkscreen opaque or metallic pass can be run without moving the job to another plant.

• Overprint varnish and UV curing
• Combination work: offset base with silkscreen highlight on the same sheet
• Die-cutting and creasing after printing

Marks and declarations to allow for

Fotoset prints the marks and declarations supplied by the customer and does not alter them. Artwork is checked before plate-making and any mark that will not reproduce cleanly is queried in writing. For safety gloves and PPE, the content that commonly appears on this item includes:

• CE marking, reproduced at the correct proportions and never redrawn from a low-resolution image
• EN 388 pictogram with the four or six performance characters set in the correct order beneath the anvil symbol
• EN 407, EN 511, EN ISO 374 and EN 420 or EN ISO 21420 marks where the glove type requires them
• Category II and Category III declarations, with notified body number where applicable
• UKCA marking for goods entering the United Kingdom

Languages

European distribution commonly requires the user information leaflet in the official languages of the destination countries: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and the Nordic languages. Indian domestic supply commonly requires Hindi, Bengali and one or more regional scripts alongside English.

Ordering pattern

• Orders build ahead of European autumn and winter delivery windows, when cold-handling and winter-lined glove volumes rise
• Trade fair cycles create short-notice runs of catalogues, folders and sample tags
• Repeat runs are frequent and must match the previous run, sometimes printed two or three years earlier

File requirements and common faults

• Press-ready PDF, version 1.4 or later, with 3 mm bleed on all four sides and crop marks outside the trim.
• Native Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW files accepted, with fonts converted to outlines and linked images embedded.
• Images at 300 dpi at final printed size. Line art and barcode artwork supplied as vector wherever possible.
• Colour built in CMYK. Spot colours called out by Pantone reference in the file and in the purchase order.
• Die line supplied on a separate named layer, in a spot colour set to overprint, not on the artwork layer.