More on Foil Stamping

With one complicated foil stamping project behind us, we moved on to something simpler—a folder using the following processes:

• Printing PMS 194 and aqueous gloss on white coated 80lb Utopia silk cover
• Printing PMS 877 and spot gloss varnish on black Plike
• Mounting of two papers to eachother
• Foil stamp dull silver
• Register foil stamp red over the silver foil
• Register reverse emboss behind the foil stamp
• Custom die cutting, folding and finishing of pockets

OK, maybe it's not simpler. But compared to the notebooks where we stamped on the Pellaq for the covers, this stamped much much better. I was so pleased with how well the Plike stamped, the experience was night and day compared to the Pellaq. To say that the Pellaq doesn't accept foil well could be an understatement. As of the posting date, we still have not found the right combination of heat, adhesive and foil type to consistently make the stamp stick to the Pellaq nearly as well as anything else I've ever stamped. If we ever do, I will be very happy, since the stamping looks so awesome on the Pellaq when it works well.

A Whole New World
The result of the double foil on the black Plike, combined with the reverse register emboss is amazing. The red foil already gets a lot of color depth since it sits on top of the silver, and has a glossy shine, but the addition of depth really kicks it up. It makes the design so much more touchable.

We also printed a pattern on the Plike using a gloss varnish, and it darkened the Plike in the areas of printing. This was also an awesome way to create depth over the entire piece since there were alternating areas of plain Plike and coated Plike. The paper also has a beautiful, velvety, matte finish. The paper hides fingerprints very well, especially compared to just about any other black, coated paper solution.

We looked at the possibility of printing the folder in black ink on white paper with an aqueous or a film lamination, but these other solutions were too fingerprinty. It can't be avoided on black. We looked at black papers, and there are many to choose from, of course.

The goal of the design was to juxtapose the touch and feel qualities with visual qualities of the paper. We wanted the outside of the folder to feel executive and expensive. The Plike feels almost like some kind of leather, or some other soft material. We considered using the black Senzo—an amazing, beautiful, velvety piece of paper—but its cost was just through the roof. The Plike ain't cheap, but the Senzo was really astronomical, especially considering how much we would need for a folder. So the Plike is what we went with. The Utopia to which we mounted it, is smooth. The gloss aqueous flood on the Utopia helped to give it an extra bit of shine and even tone. So by mounting them together, we made a 200# piece of cover stock that was black and leathery/soft on one side, and silky coated white on the other. In reality, we printed them both first, then mounted.

By using a gloss foil stamp on the Plike, we get a very strong distinction between the feel and look of the matte, soft Plike, and the shiny red foil. The addition of the reverse register emboss helps to separate the foil design more, and make it feel like it's not even made of paper. People have asked if it's plastic or metal attached to the paper. They're surprised that it's just film on paper.

From the other side (the Utopia side), the emboss is blind. We registered some knocked-out type with the blind emboss so it's a nice surprise when the folder opens and you see that the impression from the other side has meaning and was considered from this side as well. It always bugs me with embossed/debossed stuff that you almost never have a purpose for the impression on the other side of the paper. Designers ignore the fact that it's there and just kind of deal with it like the paper simply can't be used there. I'm not griping, it's hard to find a functional reason in the design for the impression on the other side. If you can, I'm saying you should consider it and build it into the piece's function.

The way the folder finishes, rather simple actually, is with pockets from the sides that fold in. So the interior of the folder has our Plike pockets over the Utopia backing. The juxtaposition is great, and the varnish on the Plike adds a little extra depth. We added business card cuts and a little text in silver (PMS 877) on the front, back and inside pockets, and the folder was complete.

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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.

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Freehand to Illustrator EPS slice and dice

A problem that I recently identified and solved: A complicated vector shape designed in Freehand, saved as an EPS and opened in Illustrator will potentially be sliced up randomly.

First of all, Freehand has always been the more intuitive illustration program. Granted, I may be biased since I learned Freehand before I learned Illustrator. But I still feel this way even after being impressed for years by Illustrator's versatility.

I am heartbroken -- yes actually deeply heartbroken, on medication, crying daily -- that Adobe will be killing Freehand. I can only hope that they learn something from this fine program and user interface before they strangle it quietly in the night.

Now that that's out of the way, here's a workaround for one little inconsistency between the apps. While they both output several types of EPS-formatted files, Freehand has problems opening them up for editing again, unless it was created by Freehand and had its Freehand data saved in the file. So, there's something different about the way they handle these things.

I recently had a situation where I had exported a complex shape from Freehand as an EPS. I suppose it may have had close to 100 anchor points or more. When I opened it in Illustrator, it had been sliced into three or four random slices, horizontally. I'm guessing that Illustrator did this to make the complex data more manageable on import.

I tried exporting as every type of EPS from Freehand (Macintosh EPS, MS-DOS EPS, Generic EPS, etc...) and then bringing it into Illustrator, to no avail. Each of them produced a sliced shape.

I also exported an Illustrator file (.ai) from Freehand with the exact same art, then opened it in Illustrator. This version resulted in no sliced illustration.

I suppose the moral of the story here is, when working between these two apps, double-check your work for consistency and compatibility.

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PDF Ridiculousness

I've learned, after years of doing this, that if you want to edit a PDF... don't.

A better use of your time is hunting down the mechanical file and its creator application, or remaking the design in something else. Just copy out the stuff you need from the unwanted PDF's corpse.

I've done it myself, where I've accidentally chucked the mechanical at some point. These things seem to happen in slow motion. You're brain recognizes it is sending a signal to your finger to STOP. Don't click the "OK" in that empty trash dialog. You realize that you and your brain and your work are hostages to the index finger, as it descends upon the mouse button mighty and proud and you gasp in horror at seeing the events unfold helplessly. You're finger had finally gotten back at you for all those places you'd sent it through the years.

So, there you are, no mechanical file, no undelete software, or undelete software that's so useless it's obviously made a pact with the index finger.

The PDF is what remains of your work on that file, and you've got a full version of Acrobat. So you think "this is great, I'll just open it up and make those few edits and that will be it." And you are wrong. Now, I'm not one to judge, but Acrobat sucks for most any editing task.

Especially editing tasks using designer-quality type and font files. The message I've seen so often is the one telling me that the font needs to be embedded for me to make the edit. You can probably guess that my frustration stems from the fact that the font is embedded, as exhibited by a look under the hood of the PDF's info. Obviously, one hand of this PDF doesn't know what the other hand is doing. More dastardly digits!

If you wanted to select a block of type to copy, it can be hard to interpret exactly what each of the myriad Acrobat editing tools do. Not to mention, they don't come in handy palettes that resemble Photoshop or Illustrator, Adobe's other killer apps. The icons are strange in some way, eerily similar, but just different enough to throw you off, and arranged in a different order. And there are other tool icons that don't make sense crowding up the whole works.

Just finding the right tool palette can be a chore too. I don't think I'm dumb, though my brother once told me I'm dumber than I think I am. But getting the palette or selecting the tool needed through the menus usually takes me a bit of time. While Acrobat has some editing capability, the interface is clearly not designed with editing as a priority, even though that's one of the great advantages of the full version Acrobat!

I would think that the editing interface would at the very least be similar to Illustrator. And that tools would act similar too. But go ahead and try to select a 1 pt rule or a graphic box. It selects around the thing, without giving you any editing capability at all. Why let me select it then? I suppose so you can move it if you wish. But even for that, it's a bit touchy where you click, and if the element is beneath another one, forget it.

I realize I'm being harsh on poor, little, blockbuster, hundreds-of-millions-of-copies Acrobat. The crop tool works, sort-of, good. It's easy to move pages among eachother and add others. But even these edits can be kludgy.

I'm just saying that the editing features would be great for someone without Illustrator, like an Illustrator or InDesign light. It might even rival Apple's Pages in layout creation and management for the masses. But it can't at all.

Instead, the poorly implemented and inconsistent editing tools only serve to frustrate a user with their promise of greatness, and lack of follow-through.

So, like I said at the top of this story, settle in to recreate your design in another app. At least you've already done it once, don't have to beg for final copy, don't have to concept the thing anymore. It'll be a snap, just like all the clients think, right?

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The pain of Microsoft Publisher

So, it's happened several times in the past few years. Printers and friends have called asking for help dealing with a Microsoft Publisher file. Any time I hear those two words, I cringe. And the dead player music from Atari's Pitfall plays somewhere in the background.

A friend and colleague called today asking for help with a Publisher file. His wife is doing some consulting work for a firm that's creating Publisher files for posters, flyers, newsletters... And they're all unavailable, leaving her to finish up the work.

He asked what to do, since these are PC Publisher files, and he has a Mac, and he can't open them with Word or Pages or anything else. He hoped I would have a magic suggestion that involved some professional design app he could use on a 30-day trial or something. I wish I did.

Publisher has been the source of at least three or four calls to me in the past couple years. These are printers calling for help dealing with these files. And I believe that I know and work with some of the finest and high-volume printers in New York, so my sample is pretty good. And these guys don't want to touch these Publisher files at all.

Their first question is usually, "can you open this and turn it into something else?" No.

Second, "Can you export it as a PDF?" Again, unfortunately, no.

I ask, "Can you have the people that made it turn it into a PDF?"

They answer, "We did, and the fonts are all screwy, it'll never print." Ah, if it's not one thing, it's another. Thank you Microsoft.

What happens here is that even if the creator of the Publisher file can output it as a PDF, they often can't find a way to embed the fonts in the file. Or they don't have the technical proficiency to execute a print production workflow, and the font-embedding discussion is lost on them.

Now, I'm not one to judge, but professional designers don't use Publisher, and it should never be used for anything that will be printed by something other than one's desktop inkjet printer. I think that the way to make a well-formatted PDF from Publisher would be to export/print the file to a Postscript file, then run that through Acrobat Distiller, having set it to embed all fonts.

This might work, but of course, requires a full version of Acrobat, or Acrobat Professional or whatever they're calling it these days. Short of that, I think Publisher files are a dead-end in the print-production world.

But, of course, I'm not one to judge.

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Playing the shell game

When printing collateral or stationery, or just about anything that might be in the same format repeatedly with changing content, consider creating a shell for it.

A shell is simply a pre-printed sheet that you keep in storage and bring out for imprinting as needed. One would often pre-print many more shells than needed at one time, and deplete them over time. A collateral shell may simply be a sheet with a header and/or a footer printed in one or several colors, leaving a large area for later imprinting. After imprinting, it can be scored and folded, die cut, or whatever finishing is desired, to complete the project.

The greatest advantage of printing shells is that they allow for highly flexible printing of content, and in some production processes, allow very low or even one-off printing of very professional-looking collateral.

For instance, one way I've used shells is for sellsheets. Go ahead and say sellsheet shells 5 times fast.

Making your shells

An easy way to make a relatively inexpensive sellsheet is to design a letter- or A4-sized document containing a header and/or footer with the company logo, perhaps a web address or other contact info, a tagline or any other features that show up on every printed marketing piece. This design can contain bleeds, and be composed of one or several plates. It also allows a designer to use coatings and other techniques on the sellsheet which might be cost-prohibitive over a series of spaced small print runs, but minimally impactful on a higher-volume run. Designers also have the option of using specific papers that may be cost prohibitive in low volume, or that aren't even available in low volume.

Instruct the printer to run a high enough quantity of your sellsheet shell design to meet the demand over your desired time period. 3 months, 6 months, a year... it's between you and your client. For instance, if your client's sales team routinely uses about 500 sellsheets per year of each of 5 product lines' collateral, then you're talking about 2500 sellsheets per year. So have your printer make 3000 to allow for make-readies and overs in future imprinting runs.

After the printer has trimmed everything, you have sellsheet shells. Now, on to the imprinting step.

Imprinting your shells

Here's where shells get their shine. When it's time for you to make finished sellsheets (in this case), setup your design files as usual, using the sellsheet shell design as a start. Place all the content into the open area of the sellsheet, and prepare your files for printing.

Then, just before pre-flighting your files, remove the design elements that had been printed on the shells, they were only a guide for you while designing. If you didn't need them there to keep you aware of what was printed on the shell, you could have simply done your imprint design in a separate document altogether.

Collect files for the print job, and send them off for imprinting. Instruct the printer of the specs and quantity needed, and request that they imprint on your preprinted shells, only using the actual shells for final make-readies in setup. Go on the run for a press check and see that registration and other basic alignment is correct. Check for any other inconsistencies with your design. After your satisfied it will print well, approve the job and start imprinting.

You can choose to imprint one, two three, four, or any number of colors when you imprint. For the most part, you are not constrained to the specs of the shell when imprinting because it's a separate print job. To make shells fairly cost-effective, only imprint one color. Since the shell can be printed in more than one color, and use other printing techniques, the finished piece will still communicate a high-quality richness not typically possible for a flexible collateral set. Costs will vary, but typically a shell-based collateral system will cost a little more than one that's not, but shells make up for the cost through a high degree of flexibility coupled with a higher-quality product.

What I've found to be the most flexible use of shells, however, has not been with offset imprinting. I send shells to be imprinted via Docucolor, giving me the ability to make 1 or 100 sellsheets in minutes, if necessary. Using the Docucolor to imprint allows me to run low-volume collateral for special events, conferences, or clients. The tailored finished product is as much a regular marketing piece as any other one and easily fools a reader into thinking of it as one of many mass-produced pieces. Another advantage to using Docucolor is that the cost and volume threshold is less intimidating for content creators.

I've found that, just as designers can get lost and blocked staring at the blank canvas or computer screen, content creators and product experts may have trouble or be wary of committing copy to a piece of collateral that will potentially be around for a while. When you need to just get something for sales and marketing support, it's much easier to convince writers and product experts to provide content when you can say that the Docucolor allows you to print just a few for now without the pressure of printing tons of collateral to acheive economies of scale. This seems to make people comfortable and it's easier to get content out of them to make some material. Sellsheet shells can also be imprinted right there in the office, if there's an emergency or a very low-run specialized piece, making them even more flexible for marketing and sales.

A downside to Docucolor is that Xerox charges your service bureau a set click-rate that you can't avoid. So the unit price for 100 Docucolored imprints is the same as the unit price for one imprint. This can make higher-volume work more expensive than offset and usually inadvisable. But compare the offset numbers against the Docucolor ones to be sure.

Also, when you are considering papers and printing processes for creating your shells, you should take into account the Docucolor and laser printability of your finished piece. Test out your desired paper on a color and a B&W laser printer to make sure the toner will stick to the paper well. I like a matte coated cover-weight sheet, and i like to run an aqueous coating over the header, which gives it a little extra finished look.

So, that's the deal with pre-printed shells, and their imprinting. What do you think? Do you have another way of working to acheive high flexibility with collateral?

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Design Dictionary

	The Design Dictionary has moved.
It had to, in order to get even more useful. Check out the new Design Dictionary to easily lookup any term instantly, see more terms defined, and examples on how to use them.

If you'd like to suggest a term for including in the Design Dictionary, please do it here in the comments section. Thanks for your input!

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