Various manufacturing techniques may be employed to construct an applique for use in an instrument cluster. In one commonly employed technique, an applique may be formed by applying different colored ink layers onto a surface of a polycarbonate sheet using a silk screen printing. In some instance, an edge of an underlying ink layer may cause a visible step line on the face of the applique. To reduce or eliminate these visible step lines, an outer boundary area of the printing layers invention are defined as a dispersing dot pattern.