Category Archives: Label Design

Covering label design from making labels, software reviews and more!

Generating labels and business cards in OpenOffice.org

Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs like gLabels and capable desktop publishing apps like Scribus, most general office users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor of the office suite they feel the most comfortable in, like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is certainly a good choice, too; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful.

by Nathan Willis

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Getting started with gLabels: Labels & Cards GNU/Linux

Following is an excellent two part series on gLabels by Nathan Willis:  Getting started with gLabels and Advanced usage with gLabels.

Labels and Cards with gLabels (Part One)

In the world of label creation software for Linux, gLabels is the long-standing market leader. It offers a convenient graphical interface in which you can design labels with the same tools you are used to finding in image editing software, but it also supports business-friendly advanced features like “mail merge” and barcode generation. In addition to that, its focus on label creation offers some advantages in printing over general office or graphics alternatives, like simple control over printing partial sheets.

You can download source code for gLabels from its SourceForge project page, but most Linux distributions include it in their package management systems — the gLabels site maintains a list of such distros on the download page. gLabels uses GTK and is designed to work with the GNOME desktop environment, but it runs just as well under KDE.

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Free Vintage Labels Courtesy of Lunagirl Images

Take advantage of these free printable fillable spectacular Vintage labels with framed designs in  PDF templates in Mailing and Shipping Label sizes courtesy of Lunagirl Images. Each design is available in 2 different types: add different information and Autofill. The Autofill template allows you to fill in your information in one label cell, hit tab and the complete template populates with that information.

Images are copyright 2004, 2007, Lunagirl Images, used with permission.  For personal non-commercial use only, may not be sold or redistributed in any form without permission of Lunagirl Images

vintage-labels

 “For your personal use only, For your Art only, not for Sale on a CD or Collage Sheet”.

example1

Label with form field Highlighted

example2

Label with text added > ready for printing

A very special thanks to  Lunagirl Images for making these great vintage labels designs available.

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Designing Labels and Cards with Scribus (Open Source)

ScribusScribus is free software page-layout tool applicable to designing all sort of documents: from newspaper ads to fliers to whole books. Because it can precisely position both images and text, it is also the preferred type of tool for designing mailing labels and business cards. A word processor has weaker features for working with pictures and other graphical elements, while a Photoshop-like image editor makes changing text an unnecessary pain. To get started with Scribus, download the latest installer for your operating system.

Designing a sheet of labels is a straightforward process with Scribus: you import the proper template, lay out one label the way you want it, then duplicate your creation to fill the rest of the slots on the template. To get the best results, however, you will need to make use of some specific Scribus features: layers, text styles, and export options.

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