Printing on Tyvek wristbands

Send us your logo, your text, or a finished design, and we print it on your Tyvek wristbands in one colour: black, silver or gold. We prepare the print-ready artwork from whatever you send, email you a proof for approval, and ship. There’s no setup fee and nothing to pay for the artwork.

One ink colour on a coloured band. The band colour does as much work as the print, which is why Tyvek bands come in 21 colours.

See Tyvek wristbands →

How it differs from full-colour printing

Tyvek printing puts one ink colour on a coloured band. You pick the band colour and the ink, and we print your design in that single colour. It is the cheapest way to brand a wristband and it is what most events use.

If you need photographs, gradients or a background that covers the whole band, that is a different product: full-colour printed wristbands. Those are printed edge to edge in four colours, and each band can carry its own number or code.

No extra costs

How it works

1. Order your wristbands, choose the band colours and add printing.
2. Send us what you have: a logo, the text for the band, or a finished design. If you only tell us the text, that is enough to start.
3. We prepare the print-ready artwork free of charge and email you a visual proof.
4. Approve it, or ask for as many changes as you need.
5. We print and ship your wristbands.

Print colours

Each design is printed in a single ink colour. You can choose black, silver or gold.

One order, different colours, different designs

Each band colour can have its own ink colour and its own design, at no extra cost. For example:

• Red bands with black ink
• Yellow bands with silver ink
• Black bands with gold ink

Ideal for events: give each day, zone or access level its own colour so staff can check them at a glance.

Every ink on every band colour

These are photographs of real printed samples, not simulations. The same design, the same band colours, one photo per ink. Worth a look before you choose, because the ink and the band colour decide readability together.

Black Silver Gold

Click the photo to enlarge it

Two things the photos make obvious. Black gives the strongest contrast on every band colour we offer, dark blue and dark green included. The one exception is the black band, where it has nothing to contrast with. And on that black band, silver and gold are the answer: both stand out completely.

Everywhere else it is a matter of taste rather than legibility. All three inks are readable, so the choice comes down to how it looks with your branding. Look at the photos before you decide, and if you are unsure, black is the safe default.

The white bands at the top of each photo show a range of typefaces, from hairline to heavy. Note how the lightest ones hold up: that is the fine-detail limit in practice.

Artwork specification

⚠️ Large solid areas of ink don’t work on Tyvek

We don’t print a full, solid block of ink across the band. That much ink in one continuous layer makes the material buckle, so the result is not something we would send out.

This applies to any large unbroken area, not only to a full background. If your design relies on one, we will come back to you and rework it before printing.

There is one way to keep a large area: screen it back, so at least 40–50% of it is open. Instead of covering the area, the press lays the ink down as a dot pattern, and the gaps between the dots are what stops the material buckling. It prints flat and works well as a soft background behind a logo.

If a solid, edge-to-edge background is the point of your design, you want full-colour printed wristbands instead. They are printed on a different material that takes full coverage.

The same design twice. Above: printed straight onto the band, which is what we do. Below: the artwork reversed out of a solid block. That block is the problem, and it is the most common way one ends up in a design.

Where your print goes

The band is 255 mm long and we can print almost all of it, up to about 20 mm from the far end. The catch is that it fastens with an adhesive end that overlaps the start, so everything past the first 150 mm disappears under that overlap once the band is on a wrist. How much disappears depends on the size of the wrist.

So print across as much of the band as you like, but keep the parts that matter inside the first 150 mm, measured from the white fastening section. The template below marks that area, along with its centre and the zone reserved for the serial number.

3/4" band. 255 × 19 mm, recommended area 150 × 17 mm. Open full size

1" band. 255 × 25 mm, recommended area 150 × 23 mm. Open full size

What works and what doesn’t

The yellow part of each band below is the visible 150 mm. The darker part is what the overlap hides.

Four placements that work, two that don’t.

• Logo and name at the start. The safest choice: it is visible whatever the wrist size.
• Centred in the visible area. Also fine, and it looks deliberate.
• Repeated along the band. The design runs the whole length, so something readable always shows.
• A pattern across the whole band. Same idea, with no single focal point to lose.

• The design sitting at the far end. It ends up under the overlap and nobody sees it.
• One very long line of text. It runs past the visible area, so the end of your event name is cut off.

The same band flat and on a wrist. The design repeats, so it reads whichever part ends up on top.

Serial numbers

Every band carries its own unique pre-printed serial number as standard, so no two bands in your order are the same. It’s what makes the wristbands hard to counterfeit or pass on, and it costs nothing extra.

The number sits in its own zone at the start of the band, printed over a fine security pattern. It’s outside the area you design, so you don’t need to leave space for it and it will never sit on top of your artwork.

Consecutive numbering within a single series is available on request, for example XYZ001–XYZ500 or XY0001–XY1000. Leading digits are randomly assigned, so these can’t be chosen.

One design for the whole run

The band itself

Questions we get asked