How to Design and Print Your Own Mailing Labels

When I started selling on-line, I typed the buyer's address and my return address in a Word document, and printed, clipped, and applied. Then I searched out my red felt pen and added the class of mail to the package and FRAGILE, if necessary, before sealing the package with tape.

Red felt pen wasn't always easily readable. I then wrote the class of mail and FRAGILE on two bits of paper and slapped them on. It still looked amateurish.

A roll of FRAGILE stickers costs between $4 and $6. That's still a materials cost I would have to pass on to my customers. I don't have even that much to spend on materials anyway. But I do have Word and Paint, and lots of half-used sheets of white paper.

I needed one readable, professional-looking, label that said everything, and knew one could be created at home.

Follow the steps and you'll have a nice-looking mailing label. You'll also learn a task on Word and have a bit of fun at the same time.

With a red fine-point pen, draw the Fragile symbol -- a wine glass with a broken corner -- on white paper. Copying and pasting an image from a commercial web site would be copyright infringement, but there are no laws against drawing.

Size at this point isn't important. Scan the image and save it as a photo file -- JPEG of GIF, for example. Then insert it into a blank Word document. Type FRAGILE under it, in a bold font. (Picture 1). There is a method to the madness, hi.

In a new blank Word document, insert two rectangular text boxes.

In the upper text box, type the class of mail -- First Class, Media Rate, International First Class. In the lower box, type any other special handling requirements. Since day one, I've used CONTENTS: PHONOGRAPH RECORDS DO NOT DROP OR CRUSH KEEP AWAY FROM HEAT (Picture 2).

Print a copy. Save materials and use the back side of a half-used sheet of paper. Save the document, and clip the text boxes.

Now that you know the vertical dimension of the text boxes, re-size the wine glass image to about the same height. It doesn't have to be exact, but it should be close.

Word will not allow text to be typed to the left or right of an image. Text can only be added above or below it.

So print a copy of the resized wine glass, and clip it

With white glue, paste the clipped wine glass image and text boxes on another blank sheet of paper. Now you can position the glass where you, and not Word, want it. This is how things were created back in the years B.C. (Before Computers).

Scan this paste-up (Picture 3). In Paint, any stray marks, like gray lines along paper edges, can be erased. Once they are, and a cleaned-up copy of the paste-up scan is in place of the original, insert it into a blank Word document.

With the label in place, you can type your return address and add anything else your package might need, like extra Fragile images, under it. Save the document, and name it; "First Class Mailing Label," for example.

Add the receiver's address, and everything you need to label a package is on one sheet of paper. No more searching for scattered labels and stickers. You can print these ahead of time and save them in a folder or three-ring binder, if your paper already has holes punched, until they're needed.

In the document with the two text boxes, you can edit the class of mail in the upper box, and repeat the process.

Save everything, including the hard-copy paste-ups. I saved all my scans and Word documents, including the mistakes, in a folder named "Project."

One label took about twenty minutes, from first scan to finished product. When you get the hang of it, the others won't take that long.

For a variation, I scanned and added the retro Air Mail sticker I use on packages sent overseas (Picture 4).

Since all mail is now shipped by air, there isn't a need for Air Mail stickers and they're no longer printed. But I'll always have mine. They're obsolete but, like the Amateur Radio stamp placed next to my call sign on the return address label, serve as a trademark that sticks in the minds of my customers.

The creation process will take a while, and these labels do have to be clipped and applied with clear tape.

However, you don't have to buy pre-printed materials, you've learned how to do something in Word, and you have attractive, professional-looking, labels to stick on packages your customers will remember; next to the colorful old stamps purchased as described in my Stamps Below Face Value article.