Printing on ALUMINUM CAN

To avoid ink contamination, you want to design with the stayaway (aka: keep away, negative trap, aluminum color). Ofcourse this is a limitation to how you must design, Try to use this as an  advantage, as the aluminum is a beautiful clean color, think of this as a metallic ink you can get for free. Grab some aluminum cans in your fridge and look for the stayaways.

http://www.cask.com/wp-content/uploads/Aluminum-Can-Specs-Template.pdf

You also have a choice of choosing transparent or opaque inks. No ink will give you aluminum metallic color, and a transparent ink will give you a metallic look. You also have flourescent, irridescent pearlescent and tactile inks, but I would not worry about that until you get the basics down. Designing for aluminum cans and press checks is a really specialized process, and  usually goes someone with experience in this.

Will Ball canning be the printer?

Thanks to all for sharing your experience. The communication with the printer isnìt going smoothly but of course, I will not go further without instruction from them.

We want to be ready for the summer, therefore, anything that can save time is helpful.

@Monika Gause

Thanks for the Lynda links, the one about spot colors has been very helpful.

I might have the wrong template since the original plan was printing on the sleeve, that would explain the "Full body white vinyl PE"

@jdanek

Yes, I now know more about spot colors and I'm currently using PANTONE + Solid Coated,

In your experience, is there any information I have to provide about the barcode?

Is it placed in the actual artwork or provided separately?

PS

the truth is:

The company has been working with a bunch of people that delivered messy files (confusing layers, missing fonts and more) for the past 6 months. I just joined the team in what actually is a rush time, that is why I'm asking around and trying my best to pull something out of this mess. Hope that my position is more understandable now

Talk to the printing folks about how to set it up. They are the ones to know. Depending on how exactly this will be produced there will be different rules to follow. And if this is an online print provider they might even have easy to follow guidelines as a download.

And yes, you might even need to admit to them that you're doing this for the first time.

And maybe it would be a good idea to watch one of these LinkedIn Learning Trainings (or maybe even all of them). They teach you the workflow from the ground up (those are not for free of course):

Learning Print Production

Print Production: Packaging

Print Production: Spot Colors and Varnish

In order to get help here that helps you and doesn't further irritate you, you will need to tell us exactly how your design will look like and where exactly you want your white undercoat to be. Also we need to know how exactly this will be printed and where. But even then: without having their file specifications, nobody will be able to tell you anything specific. And your file then won't meet the requirements. You definitely want to contact the printing folks.