A repeat is not a logo tiled. It is a piece of design with its own rules, and the mistakes are consistent enough to list.

Scale is almost always too small

Artwork is designed on a screen, at arm’s length, flat. It is seen on a box, folded, from across a counter. A repeat that looks balanced flat turns into visual noise once it is wrapped around corners.

This is worse on tissue, which gets scrunched. Scale the repeat up until it feels slightly too big flat, and it will be about right in use.

Density decides whether the mark reads

A dense all-over repeat gives you texture and pattern, but no single element gets read as a logo. A sparse repeat on plenty of ground reads as branding.

If the goal is recognition, go sparser than instinct suggests and let the background colour do the work. If the goal is a beautiful object, density is fine.

Seams are the technical part

A seamless repeat has to tile in both directions with no visible line and no accidental diagonal rhythm where elements line up across tiles. Getting that wrong is the single most common fault in wrap artwork supplied to us.

We rebuild the repeat properly as part of the free mockup and show it tiled across several sheet widths, which is where a bad seam becomes obvious.

Decide about direction early

A non-directional repeat can be wrapped any way round, which makes life easy for whoever is packing. A directional one looks more designed and has to be printed and pulled the correct way.

Neither is wrong. But it is a decision, and it is much cheaper to make it before the plates are made than after.