Labels & Hangtags

Label and Hangtag Design for the Clothing Industry

Labels and hangtags are the smallest graphics a clothing brand produces, and among the hardest working. A woven or printed label stays inside the garment for its whole life, carrying the brand name, size, fiber content and care instructions every time the piece is worn, washed or resold. A hangtag works for a few minutes on the retail floor instead: it has to stop a shopper, state the brand and the price story, and support the garment’s selling points before it is cut off at home. Designing both well takes the same discipline at two different time scales, which is why the studio treats them as one graphics specialty.

The Apparel Search Design Studio designs labels and hangtags for the clothing industry as part of its garment graphics work. The samples in the gallery below are a small selection of that work: flasher cards and hangtags built for branded apparel programs, each one drawn to carry a recognizable brand identity at a glance while leaving clean, production-ready space for the size, price and barcode information a tag has to hold in the store.

Graphics for the Garment Industry

The studio specializes in graphics for the garment industry and brings extensive knowledge of applications and production to that work. Application knowledge matters because a label design is not finished when it looks right on screen: a woven label has to survive the loom’s thread count, a printed label has to hold its type at very small sizes, and a hangtag has to be specified in a stock weight, finish and stringing method that the factory can actually run. Artwork that ignores those constraints comes back from production compromised, so the studio builds the constraints into the design from the first sketch.

The work covers the full apparel market, from men’s to boys’ to women’s to girls’ graphics, which makes the studio a one-stop shop for a brand family’s graphic needs. A licensee running several divisions can keep one visual standard across all of them instead of briefing separate designers per department, and seasonal updates, new size runs and added product categories can be drawn in the same hand as the established program.

About the Sample Artwork

The gallery shows actual samples of work created for the companies named in the captions, or for the licensees of those companies: U.S. Polo Assn. flasher and hangtag artwork, a FUBU hangtag illustration, Kangol and Newport hangtags, a Team Rated sports hangtag and others. Together they show the range the specialty covers, from clean corporate brand tags to illustrated, character-led artwork for youth and sports programs. Each thumbnail opens the full-size artwork, which is the fair way to judge tag design, since so much of the craft sits in small type and fine detail.

Apparel Search Company has no affiliation with any of the companies represented in this artwork, and nothing on this page implies representation of those companies. All logos and related indicia are the property of the particular company that owns them, and no ownership or right of any kind is claimed in the artwork presented here. The samples appear for one reason only: to show prospective clients the standard and variety of label and hangtag work the studio’s design staff is capable of creating.

From Artwork to Finished Product

Good tag artwork is only the first step toward a finished garment program. Brands that also need help turning designs into actual products can contact the Production Services team, which covers the sourcing and production side of the same industry. Keeping the graphics and the production conversation inside one industry resource shortens the distance between an approved hangtag design and cartons of correctly tagged garments arriving ready for the retail floor.

Label and hangtag projects are quoted individually, because a single woven label, a full multi-division tag program and a one-off illustrated hangtag are very different amounts of work. The Pricing Request Form is the starting point: describe the garments, the divisions and the pieces needed, and the studio can respond with the right scope. Brands reviewing the wider service range first can start from the studio hub and the services list linked below.

Photos

Flasher artwork sample created for U.S. Polo Assn. product packaging.

Hangtag artwork sample in the same U.S. Polo Assn. program.

Hangtag artwork sample with a motorcycle-theme graphic treatment.

A second U.S. Polo Assn. hangtag design, showing how one brand program supports several tag styles.

Hangtag artwork sample with bold retail lettering.

Team Rated hangtag artwork sample with a sports-graphic treatment.

FUBU hangtag artwork illustration sample.

Newport hangtag artwork sample.

Kangol hangtag artwork design sample.