How to Print on Glass: A Practical Guide

Printing on glass looks simple from the outside: ink goes on the bottle, bottle comes out branded. What makes it work — or fail — is everything happening in between. Glass is non-porous, so ink has nowhere to soak in. The bond has to be created chemically, through the right ink system and the right cure.

Step one: the screen

Your artwork is separated into individual spot colors, and each color gets its own screen — a fine mesh stretched on a frame and coated with light-sensitive emulsion. The artwork is exposed onto the emulsion, which hardens everywhere except where ink should pass through. Mesh count matters here: coarse mesh lays down heavy, opaque ink; fine mesh holds small type and thin lines.

Step two: choosing the ink

• Ceramic/organic glass inks — bonded with heat, the most durable option for glassware
• UV-curable inks — cured instantly under UV lamps, excellent color pop and fast throughput
• Opaque whites — the workhorse for clear flint glass, laid down through coarse mesh
• Metallics — gold and silver spot inks for spirits and premium packaging

Step three: printing the bottle

The bottle is mounted on a rotary fixture that turns it against the screen at the exact speed the squeegee travels. Round bottles are straightforward. Oval, tapered, and embossed glass needs a custom fixture so the print surface stays in constant, even contact — this is where cheap printing shows itself as smeared or inconsistent coverage.

Each color is a separate pass. A four-color design goes through the press four times, with registration checked between passes so the colors land exactly on top of one another.

Step four: the cure

This is the step that makes the print permanent. Heat-cured inks pass through a lehr or curing oven; UV inks pass under UV lamps. Undercured ink looks fine leaving the shop and then scratches off in transit or fades in a dishwasher. Properly cured ink survives commercial dishwashers, ice baths, freezer storage, and years of handling.

What can go wrong

• Wrong ink for the substrate — ink formulated for plastic will not bond to glass
• Undercuring — the single most common cause of prints that scratch off later
• Poor fixturing on non-round glass — uneven pressure, uneven coverage
• Dirty glass — dust, oils, and release agents block adhesion; bottles are cleaned before printing
• Registration drift on multi-color runs — colors that don't line up

Why it beats labels

A label sits on top of the glass with an adhesive layer between. Everything that attacks that layer — condensation, ice, heat, solvents, time — eventually wins. A cured print has no adhesive layer to attack. It also leaves the glass visible around the artwork, so the product itself becomes part of the design.

Doing it yourself vs. sending it out

Small hobby setups exist, but the economics rarely work. Screens, emulsion, exposure units, glass-rated ink, and a curing oven add up fast, and the learning curve on registration and cure times is steep. For anything above a handful of bottles, sending your glass to a shop with rotary fixtures and a proper cure is cheaper and far more consistent.

What to send us

• Vector artwork (AI, EPS, or PDF) with fonts outlined
• Pantone color codes from your brand guide
• The bottles themselves — we print, we don't supply glass
• Quantity and desired print placement