I compiled a collection of photos of my friend, and then burnt it into a writeable CD. I planned to give it to her as a birthday gift, however I realized that the CD face is very unappealing.

So I started looking out for ways to design and print on the ugly and plain CD face, and that is when I discovered “L7660-10 Laser Mailing Labels”.

These labels aren’t cheap. They cost me about $8 per pack and there are only 10 sheets inside. Each sheet has 2 labels, so that are 20 labels for about $8.

*Note: the bottom one is already used and I’ve taken out the printed label already. You probably also have to take note that the center of label will be “cut-out” too, that is how the labels are designed.

The labels are adhesive and work like your normal stickers, just that it’s much tighter and strong so you’ve to be very careful when you stick it. You’ll want to avoid having any fold or wrinkles because that can affect the performance of your disk.

Avery is very considerate. They came up with their own program that can help make printing on their labels much easier. This program can be downloaded from their website for free.

The program is very easy to use and pretty much self-explanatory. Basically you just load the image you want into the program or you can use the template they provided. If you run into trouble using it, don’t worry, there are tutorials that can be found on Avery website to guide you through.

However, you do have to note that the quality of the labels depends very much on your printer. If your printer is lousy, the labels will turn out unattractive too. My printer is a mid-low end and very basic printer, and the quality of the labels turn out to be pretty acceptable if I set the Print Quality to high.
However, I do have a problem with the label, and it is that even with the help of the program provided by Avery, it is impossible to get the label exactly in the middle of the label. As you can see from the photo above (2nd photo), that there will be some cropping of the label at the sides. I’ve tried everything I could, including making the design smaller and adjusting the offset when printing, there is just no way to fit it exactly in the middle and not have any cropping at the sides.

Hence, if you decide to get one of this label for your CD face, just remember to avoid making your design all the way to the edges, because they’ll most probably be cut off.

Nevertheless, this is a good product for anyone who likes to customize the dull and unattractive CD faces. It is easy to use and if you take note of the little “flaws” of the program, you can easily avoid them and make really attractive labels.