Stress Ball Design Tips and Tricks

Straight-Line Copy

This section only applies to stress balls that are round or have a raised or arched imprint area, like our Earth Stress Reliever, Brain Stress Reliever, or Heart Stress Reliever. When we're printing copy in a straight line or a geometric box on a round surface area, the imprint can become distorted. Our experienced staff will do everything in their power to keep the distortion to a minimum, but it is likely some curvature of the imprint will occur.

Font Selection

There are two main types of fonts: serif and sans serif (no serif). A serif is a feature of the letters in a given typeset. Serifs are small ticks that appear at the end of a line in a letter. An example would be the letter "T" in Times New Roman. At the end of each horizontal line is a little tick that hangs down. That's the serif!

Serif fonts include Times New Roman, Bookman Oldstyle, and Courier. On the flipside, sans serif fonts are pretty straightforward. Put simply, sans serif fonts are fonts that do not have serifs! Examples of sans serif fonts include Ariel, Helvetica, and Verdana.

Why does it matter? Well, when you are printing in a small imprint area (as you are with most stress balls), proper spacing is required to ensure serifs don't fill in or bleed into one another. Another issue you can run into with serif fonts is that the serif may disappear if it is too thin or narrow to "take" while on the press, or it can appear thicker than the original proof. For these reasons, we recommend either using sans serif fonts or spacing out the letters in your artwork to prevent your type from bleeding when printed.