Foil Stamping Pitfalls

I've just completed a job where we had to get inventive, and learned a bit along the way. It's been a foil stamping adventure, to be sure.

My best advice: if you are doing anything out of the ordinary in foil stamping, make samples. Work with your broker, laminator, printer, finisher... whoever is doing the work, and make samples before you do a full run. The number of variables that could hose your project increase by orders of magnitude the more complicated your die stamping project gets.

If it's just one standard foil on a pretty standard paper and finish, you will probably not need to do anything special ahead of time. Finishers do foil stamping all the time for jobs like that. But once you leave the confines of normal, flat, white paper, the rules start to change.

Here is a description of one of the foil stamped jobs we are discussing. I've done this one a couple times, now, but there's always something different. The first time we ran this in 2006, the job was for a branded notebook:

• 50 pages, plus cover
• white uncoated 70lb text
• 1/0, PMS cool grey 1 (designed as a grid, with branding bottom right of every page)
• microperfed to finish A4 after separation from book
• Wrapped 9x11.5 (approx) board cover with separate liner
• Pellaq by Skivertex Black on the outside
• Colored liner paper on the inside
• Blind deboss of a portion of the logo, bottom right (to flatten the texture of the Pellaq)
• Register foil stamp dull silver bottom right
• Wiro bound with black coil

This project was gravy for the text, binding and microperf. The cover, however, presented a series of difficulties.

Definitely Not the Gravy Train
First, the texture of this specific paper, Pellaq, is difficult to work with when embossing and stamping. It's a paper with a hard coating, what I imagine to be a UV gloss, and a stiff texture. So even after the deboss die hits it, the texture is still a little noticeable.

This becomes more of a problem when you stamp a foil on it. The foil never completely releases around all the edges of the design, since there is texture in the paper to grab and hold on to it. The foil stamp die does a pretty good job of flattening the texture, but around the edges, you'll generally get a little picking. In retrospect, this happened for us in perhaps a more drastic fashion because we hit the Pellaq with the deboss and foil after it had been wrapped on the board. This means the dies were striking a softer surface than if it were just the Pellaq alone.

Another issue with the Pellaq is its coating. It's quite tough, and wouldn't always accept the foil as readily as a normal coated or uncoated paper. So that meant more picking was a possibility with this job.

Eventually, we had to go through all the covers by hand and reject about half of them as unacceptable. Of the remaining ones, the foil stamp was great on about half, and acceptable enough on the other half. Luckily, we only made about 300 of them.

Result Still Awesome
The end result was a beautiful, tough, sturdy notebook that our clients, employees, and board members have continued to ask for more than a year later.

Applying These Techniques Again
The more recent execution of a similar project, I've just completed. This was a much smaller book with two-color foil stamping, presenting another set of issues that needed to be managed:

• 25 pages, plus cover
• white coated 100lb cover
• 3/3, Black, PMS 194, and Aqueous satin flood
• last page has a pocket
• Wrapped 5.5x6.5 board cover with separate liner
• Pellaq by Skivertex Black on the outside
• Senzo by Corvan colored liner paper on the inside
• Foil stamp logo in dull silver
• Register foil stamp closest finish match to PMS 194 on the mark
• Wiro bound with black coil

We did a ton of testing on this, and found early in the tests that putting a color, the maroon (PMS 194), on the black Pellaq was not going to work. The foil layed down fine, but the color was affected by the black paper. The maroons kept coming out too dark, no matter how bright a foil was used. Apparently colored films are somewhat translucent.

We decided to try three tests where we hit the design first with a clear foil then the maroon. We tried another where we hit first with a white, then the maroon. Then a third test where we hit with a silver, then maroon. This is an idea I lifted (probably not original in foil stamping either) from t-shirt screen printing. If you are printing on a dark shirt, and have bright colors to print, you will likely lay down what's called a "flash" before printing the bright colors. This is because the colors are translucent, and would allow too much of the dark shirt to show through, so a flash in either clear or white underneath the colors would brighten them up a lot. A clear flash will allow the colored inks to sit on top of the shirt without sinking into the fabric, thus staying bright. The advantage to a clear flash is you don't have registration issues to resolve.

So, after we did our foil tests using a silver, white, or clear "flash," we found we had registration issues. The clear didn't work as expected, the white was imperfect, not laying down well, and ultimately still not white enough. The silver was the only one which could completely block out all the black background. Plus it had the advantage of giving a tiny bit more depth to the color we stamped on top of it. What we found was also that these tests were critical to getting the color as close a match as possible. The end result color is what is most important. Press men don't always appreciate this, and it is something you may need to be determined about. For example, the foil we ended up using on top of silver did not match our PMS 194 when stamped on white. But the end result looked correct, and that's all the end user cares about.

Our registration issues had to do with the depth of the strike, and the alignment of the dies. With foil stamping, we're dealing with a process that involves heat, hands, pressure and time. And those variables make it hard to guarantee perfect registration the way you can on a modern computerized press nowadays.

When the die would hit our wrapped covers the first time with the silver, it would also make our first impression on the wrapped board cover. This would stretch the paper and force the hot foil onto it's surface. Then we would come back with the maroon foil (which required a higher heat application, I found out later) using the same die. And what we found was that the maroon was applying the foil into the area already impressed by the silver, but it was making a slightly smaller foil stamp since there was no stretching paper or debossing boards involved. We ended up with a hairline ridge of silver around every edge of the colored film.

Stunning
Now, allow me to say that this was an absolutely amazing and beautiful result. But our foil stamper couldn't guarantee the same result on all of the pieces, so we did that treatment for none. Instead we created another die for the mark (the part of this particular logo which was getting silver foil under, and maroon on top), which was trapped appropriately. I brought in all the elements from the edge by about 95%, in some cases by sizing down in the original art, in some cases, picking the right thickness of white stroke to add around the under element.

We conducted more tests and the stamping was right on. The trapped die under the maroon worked beautifully.

So, I've got another upcoming job where we use the Pellaq wrapped on board as a cover. We're going to try stamping first, then wrap the boards.