Die cut

A die cut is a shaped cut made with an actual die. A steel rule (a thin blade) is bent to your outline, mounted in a wooden base, and stamped through the stock like a cookie cutter. It gives you rounded corners, arched-top hang tags, leaf-shaped stickers, a window in a folder, or the whole flat blank of a carton.

Reach for it when the silhouette is doing brand work: a shaped sticker reads as an object rather than a square, and a die-cut window turns a cover into a frame for the page behind it. On short runs a digital cutter (drag knife, laser, or router) traces the same silhouette with no tooling cost, which is why small sticker runs got cheap. That is contour cutting rather than die cutting, even when the finished shape is identical, and shops use the words loosely enough that it is worth asking which one you are being quoted. Long runs still pay for a physical die once, then cut fast forever. Kiss cut means the blade goes through the sticker face only and leaves the backing intact; through cut goes through everything.

Gotchas: blades have a tolerance, usually around 1mm of drift, so artwork needs bleed past the cut line and safe margin inside it exactly like a normal trim. Steel rule cannot hold tiny inside detail or sharp interior corners, so a lacy logo cut comes back mushy. Send the cut path as a vector dieline, not as a drawn black outline in the artwork.