We offer several custom finishes to your prints at Mojoprint, one of which is metallic foiling (a.k.a hot stamping). It is a technique used widely on christmas and other greeting cards. The metallic, shiny little angels, presents and various tear-jerking messages of good will to be found on such cards are all produced using hot stamping.

We are now offering this custom finish as a new product, Metallic foil cards, available in business card and A6 postcard size — perfect for your own festive creations!

Here we will show you how to prepare your data for metallic foiling.

It is important to understand that the foil is stamped to the design *after* the printing process and not during or before. With that being the case, we need to create two separate files: Our design file (that gets printed) and our die file (that gets stamped), both with identical crop and bleed marks so that it all lines up.

A representation of how the finished product might look and the two files used to create it

Design your card as per any normal job, making sure you have a 3mm bleed and are using either one of our templates or have set up the crop and bleed marks correctly.

While the design that will be printed can be any kind of data you like (bitmap or vector) the design to be stamped *must* be Adobe Illustrator vector data.

Define the area to be foiled using black (100% K), and only solid fills and no strokes or gradients. If you have used strokes you will need to outline them. Be careful not to use text below 6pt in size and stay clear from very fine or detailed patterns since they will most likely not foil well, if at all.

Once you are happy with the design, save it with the name ‘design’. Then group and cut all the 100% K elements from it (the areas to be foiled), re-save so that your ‘design’ file now only has the printed design in it.

Then delete all the remaining elements and paste in place (shift + command v) the 100% K black foil design elements. This will ensure they paste back exactly where you cut them from. Now save the file with a new name ‘die’ or ‘foil’ etc.

You should be left with two files, one that has the black foil elements, and one that has the design to be printed.

Order your cards, submit your two data files and simply let us know if you would like gold or silver foil. Happy foiling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 2:00 pmand is filed under Print-ready data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.