Certain products have an option to add a foil blocked area to your design. You indicate this by using a special finishing swatch. This swatch is available in our templates, please ask for a copy before starting your design.
All of our InDesign templates include specific colour swatches for all finishing options or use the instructions below to set up the OPULEAF-GOLD, OPULEAF-SILVER and OPULEAF-COPPER spot colours yourself:
Place the Foil Blocking elements above your using one of the special Foil Blocking spot colour swatches.
There are 2 swatches available:
You can only use one or the other, not both
These swatches must remain as a spot colours and must not be adjusted in any way.
Set the OPULEAF-GOLD or OPULEAF-SILVER elements to Overprint from within your design application.
Avoid having areas of Foil Blocking bleeding to the edge as chipping and flaking of the foiled area may occur once the job has been guillotined.
Only add Foil Blocked elements on the front page of your artwork.
Foil stamping or blocking is a process where a solid area of the paper has a silver or gold metallic foil applied by heat and pressure This means that the registration with print can vary by ±1 mm. This means you should expect the Foiled element to move around the page by up to ±1mm.
If you are aiming to cover a printed shape having a hard edge, then the Foiled area should overlap the printed edge by 1 mm to allow for any inherent variations in registration.
Foiling is not suited to alignment with fine detail, such as small type, or shapes with thin lines.
Our rule of thumb:
You’ll get best results when you don’t try to match the Foiling to printed objects, and instead treat it as a design element in its own right. Seperate Foiled elements should have a minimum spacing of 1mm. Placing elements too close to each other will result in them becoming one shape and filling in.
Avoid using Foiling on small text. Fine fonts, particularly those with Serifs or tapered lines do not produce good results. The thinnest part of the font must be 1mm in width.
Avoid having areas of Foiling bleeding to the edge as chipping and flaking of the Foiling area may occur once the job has been guillotined.
Foil Blocked elements must be supplied in vector format; any text shapes to be spot-varnished must be converted to paths/outlines.
Remember to:
That includes the counters, stroke width and serifs on fonts.
Foiling cannot be specified as a gradient or tint, i.e. a changing tint from 100% to 0% over an area of artwork.
The process of foiling leaves a faint cross hatch effect on the reverse of the product where foiling is applied on the front. Foil residue can also be present on the edges of foiled areas. This is inherent in the foiling process.
We have produced some printed samples that demonstrate how to use Foil blocking, ask us for your free copies.
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