Artwork is designed flat and applied to a compound curve. Everything surprising about branded glassware comes from that one fact.

Wide marks distort, narrow ones do not

The wider a mark runs around a bowl, the more the ends curve away from the viewer, so a long horizontal wordmark reads as though it is bending — because it is.

Stacking a long name onto two shorter lines fixes it almost every time, and costs nothing.

Mind the grip line

On a stemless glass the hand sits on the bowl, so a centred mark spends most of its life under someone’s fingers. Set it lower. On stemware the equivalent mistake is a mark on the foot, which is invisible whenever the glass is being held.

Scale per profile, do not reuse

A file sized for a coupe reads cramped on a Nick & Nora and lost on a large V. These are different bowls, not different sizes of the same bowl, and artwork should be rescaled for each rather than shrunk.

We do that as part of the free mockup and show it on the actual curve, not flat.

Fine linework is fine, actually

One thing that surprises people: sand-etching holds much finer detail on glass than most decoration methods hold on other substrates. If your mark has delicate linework, etching is usually the method that keeps it.