Greek-Kit vs. GreekDots vs. DIY: What Your Greeking Kit Actually Needs

If you're building a greeking workflow, you'll hear three answers: cover dots, licensed graphics, or print your own. Two of those are techniques; the third is a sourcing decision. We make one of the products in this comparison, so read accordingly — but the framework below is the honest one, and it's the same one we'd give you if you bought nothing.

Start with technique, not brand

There are two ways a greeked prop can read on camera:

Masked — a neutral shape (dot, square, stripe, rectangle) covers the logo. The mark becomes a clean, deliberate absence. Fast, universal, zero aesthetic decisions. On tech — laptop lids, camera bodies, appliance badges — a matte shape over an emblem is the industry standard and reads as design, not damage.

Replaced — a designed fictional graphic makes the prop read as a real (but nonexistent) brand. A cereal box stays a cereal box; a bottle stays a beer you've just never heard of. This is what narrative sets want anywhere near focus, because a covered logo always looks covered, and a shelf of gray rectangles announces the workaround.

A working kit needs both techniques. The real comparison is what each sourcing option covers.

Option 1: GreekDots

GreekDots sells the masking technique, and does it credibly: sheets of dots, rectangles, ovals, and pinstripes, primarily in black and matte silver/charcoal vinyl, plus a cleared-label line and a book. If your entire greeking need is "put clean dark shapes over logos on tech and gear," it's a reasonable focused buy.

What it doesn't give you: the replacement technique at all — no designed fictional labels, logos, or brand graphics — and a shape palette that lives mostly in black and silver. The moment a prop near focus needs to read as a product rather than a redaction, or the moment you want a cover shape that matches the prop's color story instead of announcing itself in black, you're shopping again.

Option 2: Greek-Kit

Here's the part most people get wrong about this comparison (including, occasionally, our own customers before they open the kit): Greek-Kit isn't the "other" technique — it's both. The kit includes neutral cover shapes — dots, squares, stripes in a multitude of colors, not just black and silver, so a mask can disappear into a prop's palette instead of sitting on top of it. And on top of that masking layer sits the thing no one else offers: designed fictional replacement graphics — logos, retail and packaging labels, creative graphics, metallic foils — all pre-cleared and licensed for on-screen use, plus VFX tracking markers for the compositing side of the same job.

The licensing is the structural difference, not a feature bullet. Every page in the Ultimate Greek-Kit — 102 of them — is covered by a royalty-free license for film, TV, and commercial production. A neutral dot doesn't need clearing; a designed graphic absolutely does, and that's exactly the layer where "somebody's cool fake logo" becomes next month's legal note. If the graphics in your kit are designed, the license question is the first question. (More on that trap in Greeking 101.)

Option 3: DIY printing

In-house printing wins on specificity — when the sign must say "Petrossian's Deli," someone's designing Petrossian's. Scripted hero graphics are and will remain an art-department craft, and no kit replaces that.

As a general strategy, DIY carries three costs that rarely make the comparison sheet:

• Labor math. Design hours, print runs, cutting, weeding, reprints when the stock curls under tungsten. The unit cost of DIY is coordinator-hours, not vinyl.
• The clearance boomerang. Sourced art — stock graphics, found images, restrictively-licensed fonts — can itself be someone's IP. Covering a real trademark with an uncleared graphic trades a visible problem for an invisible one. Original in-house design avoids this and costs the most labor of all.
• Consistency. Ten print runs across a season drift in color, finish, and size. Manufactured pages don't.

Head-to-head

The honest bottom line

If your greeking needs start and end at dark shapes on electronics, GreekDots covers that job. If your set has packaging, bottles, signage, wardrobe, screens — anything the camera might actually look at — you need both techniques and a license behind the designed layer, and that's the whole reason Greek-Kit is built the way it is: the masking shapes and the replacement graphics and the markers, pre-cleared, in one kit. Keep DIY for the hero pieces that deserve a designer's hours. Whatever you buy, ask every vendor — including us — the clearance coordinator's question: "Is this art licensed for on-screen commercial use, and can you show me the terms?"

See what's in the Ultimate Greek-Kit, or browse all collections. License questions are covered in the FAQ.