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Design Your Own Garment Tags
Designing your very own swing tags for clothing can be very rewarding. Not only do custom clothing tags help in making your items stand out, but they can add tangible value for your customers. They can also help your garments achieve a designer look, especially if your product tag is well designed or has special finishes such as tags with metallic foil highlights.
Garment tags aren’t there just for show though, a lot of clothing tags are there to display prices, your brand name, washing instructions and most importantly, the size of the item you’re attaching it to.
How To Make A Hang Tag In Illustrator
So, before we begin, we’ll be designing our product tags in Adobe Illustrator. You can use other software such as Photoshop, as long as you can adjust the size of your tag template and save your design out as a PDF.
It’s worthwhile to think about any clothing tags you vividly remember, be it from something you saw hanging on the clothes rack, or if it was from a garment you bought. Designs that stood out to you are a good place to start as you’ll know what tag designs you like. Making your tag noticeable and stand out is key, but it also wants to thematically match your brand or vibe.
Hang Tag Dimensions
So, let's get started designing our garment tag. To begin with we’re going to decide on the size of our tag. While there is no standard hang tag size, we’ve come up with a very common size which is 50mm x 90mm.
First, we’re going to need to create a new artboard that is 50x90mm. We’re also going to add 3mm of bleed at this point too which basically means that and designs you want to push right up the edge of the tag actually need to “bleed” off the edges by 3mm.
Don’t forget to set your colours to CYMK too as this is what the printer will print in.
Next, let's duplicate our artboard so we have a front and a back for our product tag. To do this, select the artboard tool, left-click on your artboard to select it, then hold alt and left click and drag to duplicate.
Now we’ve got our artboards all set up, it’s time to get creative.
What Information Do You Need To Include On A Clothing Tag?
While designing your product tag, there are some things you’ll need to include, and some things that are optional. Here’s a run-down.
Drill Hole For Your Tags
Yep, first, you’ll need to decide how you want your tag to hang as this will leave a hole in your tag and you don’t want it to go through any of your information. The usual size drill holes for tags are either 3mm or 5mm. We’ll use a 5mm hole at the top centre of our tag. All we do for now is create a circle where we want to hole so we can design around it.
Add Your Branding To Your Tag
It’s always good to include your brand logo so that customers can associate the garment with your brand or if you’re an independent designer, even just your name will work well. It’s usually a good idea to make this the centrepiece of your design on the front and then maybe have a smaller alternative on the back.
Include The Size On The Tag
Probably one of the most important things to include in the design of your garment tag is the actual size of your item. Pretty simple, just add whatever size the clothing is to either the front or the back or both.
Does Your Swing Tag Need A Price?
If you want, you can include the price of your garment right on the tag. Alternatively, you can always create a blank space where you can write the price on by hand, or attach price tags.
Include Care Instructions Somewhere On Your Tag
If you want to go that extra mile, you can even include washing instructions on your clothing hang tag. This can be as simple as a message to wash with delicates, or if you know exactly how the item should be washed, there are icons you can get for these.
Add Your Website To Your Tag
This is an optional one, but pretty useful. Say for example someone finds your clothing in a store and wants to learn more about your brand, or possible wants to find more items. Having your website on your product tag is a great way to send customers directly there.
Once you’ve gone through all these steps, you should hopefully have a double-sided product tag designed up. All that’s left to do now is the remove the dot we added for the drill hole, as we don’t actually want to print that and then finally we can save it out as a PDF.
Save Your Print Ready Garment Tag Files
To save your tag out as a PDF head to “File>Save As” and then in the drop-down for file type select “Adobe PDF”.
This will then prompt another screen to pop up with PDF settings. The only thing you need to do here is go to “Marks and Bleeds” on the left-hand side and tick the box that says “Trim Marks”. Then you can click “Save PDF” and you’re ready to order with the finished artwork.
Hang Tag Material
Usually, custom hang tags will be printed on either silk or uncoated paper at around 300gsm. This is the standard thickness for product tags. We recommend this thickness as it’s around the same thickness as a business card so it feels nice and sturdy.
You can also choose to have a laminate finish on your tags. You could have a gloss, matt or soft-touch effect that gives high-quality shelf appeal to your clothing labels, especially the soft touch as it has a velvet-like feel. We’d recommend it!
Hang Tag Template
Now we’ve wrapped up how to design a swing tag, all that’s left to do is order them, you can do that by taking a look at our product tag printing product and configuring the options to be just as you want.
If you want, you can download the illustrator file that we’ve created by clicking here. It should help in understanding how we’ve set up the artwork and you can also play with it to produce your own template.
Don't forget, this guide can apply to any hangtag design from woven labels to gift tags. Simply change out the information you include!
