A door hanger looks like one of the simpler printed items, yet its file has requirements that neither a leaflet nor a business card carries. The reason is simple: it is not a rectangle cut along a straight line, but a shape cut along a contour, with a hole in the middle.
What follows is a set of instructions you can work through in order. You do not need to be a designer - you only need to tell artwork apart from instructions for the machine.
- The shape and the hole are two separate closed contours - drawn as lines, never as white patches inside the artwork.
- All technical lines are hairline weight, vector based, kept in one document on a separate layer.
- Red is the cutting line, cyan is the creasing line - literally cyan, not any blue that happens to be at hand.
- The print file goes separately - artwork only, with no technical lines on it.
- Two sides mean two pages of the file - the same page size, the same zero point, scale 1:1, and a deliberate decision about which side faces the corridor.
Why a door hanger file differs from a leaflet
A leaflet is cut along a straight line, and it is enough for the background to run past the edge. A door hanger is cut along a contour, which means along any shape, and it also has a hole for the handle. Artwork alone is not enough here, because nothing in it says where the cut runs.
That information is carried by vector lines. A vector is a drawing saved as a path, that is a curve with a defined course, rather than a collection of pixels. The machine can read it and drive a tool along it. A line painted with a brush is, to the machine, a coloured patch.
On short runs the contour is cut by a flatbed plotter, a device guiding a blade along the path you supplied. On larger quantities the job is done by a cutting die, a steel form that stamps the shape out in one press. The file is prepared the same way in both cases.
Two contours: the outer shape and the handle hole
The outer shape is one closed path, meaning a line that returns to its starting point. The handle hole is a second, completely separate one. Do not merge them into a single object and do not mark the hole with a white circle in the artwork - a white disc is a design element, not an instruction to cut.
The hole usually takes the form of a plain circle, or a circle with a narrow slot running to the top edge if the hanger has to be slipped on from the side. Both are drawn identically.
A safety margin around the hole
Nothing important may sit close to the hole. Leave a band of empty space around the hole and the slot, a few millimetres on every side. There are two reasons: the tool has its own tolerance and may miss your drawing by a hair, and this part of the board rests against the handle, so it gets dirty fastest. The same rule holds along the outer edge. More on calculating those distances in our post on bleed, margins and cutting lines.
Bleed on a shape that is not rectangular
Bleed is the strip of background that runs beyond the cutting line. Thanks to it no white sliver appears after cutting, even when the blade misses by a fraction of a millimetre. On a hanger the bleed follows the same shape as the contour, only enlarged: copy the contour, spread the copy outwards and crop the background against it. Around the hole it works the other way round - the background reaches slightly into the hole.
The standard for technical lines - no exceptions
This part is rigid. Every rule exists so that the machine never has to guess.
- Hairline weight - draw technical lines as a hairline, the thinnest line available. With a thick one nobody knows whether to cut along its centre or its edge.
- Red is the cutting line - the outer contour and the handle hole.
- Cyan is the creasing line - literally cyan, one of the four inks the machine prints with. An ordinary blue off a screen palette is a different colour and will not be read as an instruction.
- Vector, not image - the lines have to be paths, not strokes painted onto a picture.
- A separate layer - all lines in one document, on one layer, named unambiguously.
- The print file goes separately - a second version without lines, artwork only. A red contour printed on the board cannot be undone.
Line colours are given in CMYK, the four inks the machine prints with: red is built from magenta and yellow at full value, cyan from cyan alone.
Two sides and half a turn on the handle
The front and the back are prepared as two pages. You may send one PDF with two pages or two separate files - the condition is the same: an identical page size, the same zero point, meaning the same reference corner, and scale 1:1. We write about file formats in our post on which format to send your project to the printer in.
This is where the mistake lurks that does not occur with other printed items at all. A hanger does not lie flat on a table; it hangs on a handle and turns freely. When somebody spins it round, the second side should appear in the same position as the front - and that only happens when both pages of the file share the same top, the one with the hole. The trouble begins when the reverse is created by rotating the page half a turn, because that was easier to design or because the software behaved that way. The result shows up only on the finished board: the wording stands on its head and the hole sits at the bottom.
Settle this before you send the file. Decide which side faces the corridor and which faces the room, and record it in the file names. The simplest test takes a minute: print both sides on ordinary paper, glue them back to back, cut the shape out and hang it on a handle.
Creasing, if the hanger has a fold
Door hangers are printed on board thicker than a leaflet, because the piece has to hold its shape on a handle for several days. Thicker board is not folded dry: the paper cracks along the fold and the ink layer splits apart. That is why every fold is marked with a creasing line in cyan. A crease is an indentation made before folding, so the fibres give way in a controlled place.
Our door hangers are flat, so the crease layer stays empty - creasing applies to the items we fold, such as folders and folded flyers. With a fold, check whether the crease line runs through a logo or the middle of a sentence - a fold lightens the ink slightly along the spine.
The order in which to prepare the file
This sequence saves the most corrections, because each step closes off the one before it.
- Pick the hanger shape in the calculator and download its template - the dimensions and the position of the handle hole are already set in it.
- Draw both contours as closed paths, in red, at hairline weight, on a separate layer.
- Add the creasing lines in cyan, if the hanger has a fold.
- Mark the safety margin around the hole and along the outer edge.
- Design both sides and decide which one faces the corridor. Check it on a printout.
- Run the background and photographs into the bleed along the enlarged copy of the contour, including around the hole.
- Save the print file with artwork only - delete the template lines and labels before you send it.
Before you close the project, convert your text to curves, meaning to shapes. A letter saved as a shape looks the same on every computer, including one without your typeface installed. Thirty seconds of work that rescues an entire run.
A door hanger is one of those printed items where half the work happens outside the artwork: in the contour, in the hole, in the colour of a thin line nobody will ever see. The rest is ordinary designing. We have gathered the requirements in the file preparation section, and the slip-ups that keep coming back for correction in our post on the most common mistakes in print files. You upload the finished project when ordering door hangers or their eco version, choosing whether we print straight from your file or our designer looks at it first and sends back a preview for your approval.
