Unleash Your Creativity With HP Mosaic Print

2 min read
May 31, 2022

Why limit your creativity? With HP Mosaic, you can achieve infinite print iterations for packaging easily with no need for an army of designers.

HP Mosaic: What is It?

HP Mosaic is a print effect that leverages a single source file of “seed art” to create endless unique printing impressions for your boxes and labels.


Major brands including Nutella, Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, and many others are already taking advantage of this unique print technology to launch powerful packaging-driven marketing campaigns. However, Mosaic is not just for household names. Startups and growing brands can easily leverage Mosaic on their next packaging project by working with a packaging provider that operates HP digital print equipment and software, like The BoxMaker.

HP Mosaic: How It Works

HP Mosaic combines, scales, transposes, and rotates base design patterns to create limitless unique variations of your packaging design within a designated area of your print file. Simply supply your base pattern file to The BoxMaker and our production design team will leverage HP’s SmartStream Designer software and digital print technology to generate as many iterations of your design as you desire.

Here we see a simple example of 9 unique labels to be printed, each featuring a variable background image pulled from the same source file:

HP Mosaic Print 1

Once the base pattern is developed, the automated software handles all of the processing. Our creative team can work with you to set your desired parameters into the software, including identifying ideal rotation and scaling ranges for the best results based on your base pattern file.

HP Mosaic Print 2

Base Pattern Best Practices

For best results, base pattern designs should be complex, with a lot of detail and color. The more complex and colorful the original file, the better the results. Base pattern files should have a 1:1 ratio (square) and be a vector file format in the CMYK color profile.

HP Mosaic in Action: Holiday Boxes

To demonstrate the power of Mosaic, The BoxMaker leveraged this technology to produce our 2020 Holiday Kits. Each kit included an exterior shipping carton and two interior boxes. All three boxes used HP Mosaic print to create a completely unique imprint on every single box.

We selected three base patterns to create our boxes:

HP Mosaic Print 3

These base patterns were then dynamically applied to each box dieline and printed on the HP PageWide C500 press, creating a different graphic result for each box:

HP Mosaic Print 5

The result? A cohesive collection of boxes that all complement one another but are each completely unique.

Start Iterating Today

Bring your digitally printed packaging designs to life easily with HP Mosaic Print. The Packaging Advisors of The BoxMaker are ready to answer any questions you may have about this exciting software and print opportunity.

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