In recent times, it seems that the design of soft-drink cans has become more elaborate and that more colors are featured in said designs. My question is, how are these cans printed? It seems to me that they can’t be done on a CMYK press because… they’re cans. Maybe I’m completely off base here. Hopefully somebody here is a complicated aluminum-can-design specialist. Here’s hoping.
The designs are printed on a thin plastic film which is then laminated to the aluminum.
Nope. They’re directly printed in a variant of the offset process that’s used to print newspapers.