All articles · 2026-09-18

Printed tickets and wristbands: artwork, numbering and the tear line

Tickets are printed in long runs with sequential numbers and a perforation. Why the design belongs in vector, and what must stay out of it.

Tickets look like the simplest print job at an event and cause more reprints than any other. The reason is that a ticket is three separate things pretending to be one: a design, a number that changes on every copy, and a perforation the press has to be told about.

A ticket outline with notched sides, a dashed tear line and a star: on the left a small compressed copy; on the right clean even outlines.
Left: 200 pixels, JPEG quality 64. Right: Logo mode, three colours. 7 paths, 100 nodes.

The design: vector, at the finished size

Ticket stock is small, so everything on it is small. A mark that has been through a few rounds of email compression will print visibly soft at 50 mm wide, where there is nothing else on the paper to distract from it. Trace it, set the colours to your real values, and lay the ticket out at its true millimetre size so you can see what is actually legible.

The number: never part of the artwork

Sequential numbering is done by the press, either with a numbering box on the machine or as variable data on a digital press. Your job is to leave a clear, clean space for it and to tell the printer where it goes and what range you need. Ticket numbers drawn into the artwork mean a thousand separate files, and one of them will be wrong.

The left notch and edge magnified: on the left the curve is a blocky staircase; on the right a smooth notch with a clean edge.
The notch at roughly 2.4×. A die or a plotter follows this line exactly, so it has to be a line.

The perforation: a line you draw, but not in ink

The tear line in the example above is drawn dashed because that is how it is shown to a human. The press does not print it — a perforation is a separate operation with its own tooling. Put it on its own layer, name it clearly, and ask your printer how they want it supplied. Some want a spot colour, some want a separate PDF page, and all of them would rather be asked than guess.

Wristbands are tickets with less room

The printable area on a fabric or Tyvek wristband is narrower than people expect, and it wraps, so anything near the ends disappears into the join. Keep the important mark in the middle third. Fine detail does not survive on fabric at all: a wristband is a two-colour job with a bold shape, whatever the artwork looked like on screen.

Before you approve the proof

  • Check the number position against a real ticket, not a PDF on screen
  • Confirm the perforation is where the design expects it — not through the event name
  • Check the smallest text at 100 % on paper; if you have to lean in, it is too small
  • Order a few more than you need: a numbered run cannot be topped up later without a second setup charge