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A variety of finishing techniques can be used to make a product stand out from the competition and, often literally, add a little sparkle to a design. Metallic foils and holograms can be applied for security as well as visual purposes, while embossing and thermography can create an impression of quality, and die-cutting can be used for clever 3D or pop-up designs.

hile printers are increasingly bringing finishing in-house, that is not the case with hot foil blocking. “The skill base isn’t there, finding a good foil operator in the UK is very difficult,” explains Paul Humphrey, commercial director of Postglow Printers, a specialist finishing firm. This means anyone considering getting work foiled will have to employ a separate finisher, which will increase turnaround times.
Hot foiling works by running a sheet of foil over the item and then a hot metal die impresses the foil onto the sheet at the desired places. “Getting the die made is the main time constraint,” says Steve Middleton, sales and marketing director at print finishers Celloglas. A metal die has to be made of the exact shape and size of the design that needs to be foiled. The timescale for producing a standard magnesium die is around 36 hours. “Once the die is made we can run at 2,000 sheets per hour,” he adds.

Security holograms
Holograms can be used to enhance the security of high-value print, such as concert tickets. These can be in standard designs or can be specially created for the customer, which has the advantage of being unique and even harder to forge. Alternatively, a company’s logo can be etched into the die that is to be used for hot foiling. This then leaves a slightly raised impression of the company’s logo in the foil.

Embossing works in a similar way to foiling. A metal die is made, along with a matching female block with a sunken impression of the area to be embossed. The male metal die then stamps into the female die, with the paper or card in between. This leaves a raised (embossed) or sunken (debossed) impression, depending on which way the paper is presented.

Design stage
Middleton says that when considering foiling it is worth consulting a finishing firm at the design stage. Foil is expensive and the more that is used the more expensive a job becomes. “However, suppose you have a large B1-size sheet, which is to be cut into 10 cards, each with a tiny bit of foil on. You may as well use more foil on each card because you will end up paying for the whole B1-size sheet of foil,” he explains.

It is possible to combine embossing and foiling. This is usually done in two passes; foiled first and then embossed and works well on laminated stock as it increases the shine from the foil. It can be done in one step, known as fluted foil. The initial die is more expensive to produce for this process, however it does ensure that the foil and the embossed area match perfectly, with no register problems.

If a job is being printed and then foiled, it is essential to inform the printer, as certain inks contain high levels of wax, which can cause the foil to peel off. Equally, if a piece is to be varnished or laminated as well, this can be done prior to foiling, to avoid taking the shine off the foil. However, foiling can pull off the laminate, while UV varnishes often prevent the foil from adhering, so it is advisable to find out which order is recommended by the firm doing the foiling.

Cold foiling
Windles Group has developed a new technique called Foiltone, in which the foil is applied as part of the printing process, enabling more printers to foil in-house. Foiltone does not use heat, meaning that substrates such as plastic, which would melt using traditional foiling, can be foiled.

Foiltone works by using two of the ink units on a standard six-unit litho press, leaving the remaining four units to print the standard range of colours – CMYK. The first unit is filled with glue, which ‘prints’ the glue onto the area that is to be foiled. The second unit releases silver foil, which then sticks to the areas covered in wet glue, but nowhere else. The foil can then be overprinted CMYK, to produce whatever colour of foil is required.

“Most foilers keep a range of colours of foil in stock and if you want a more unusual colour it will have to be ordered in, which can mean a long wait and minimum order quantities,” says John Hopkinson, sales and marketing director at OFT Technology, the company set up by Windles to market Foiltone. As Foiltone does not require a die to be made, makeready time is drastically reduced. And, although the cost of the foil is slightly higher, the overall cost is likely to be much lower, because there is no die, especially for shorter runs.

But Hopkinson does not see this cold foiling taking over the traditional hot foil market. “It is opening up new markets and giving designers more scope,” he says. “Designs incorporating five different colours of foil, which would have been considered too expensive, can now be done.” Hopkinson thinks brochures and magazines are likely to be the biggest markets for the new technique. A mail-order company is currently looking into using Foiltone for the jewellery sections of its catalogue, to give each item of jewellery a metallic sheen.

Foiltone also makes it possible to reverse-out sections of the foil (ie leave a hole in the foil) to allow the paper or board to show through. This is particularly useful if you want a white area in the midst of the foil, as “white is one of the most difficult colours to overprint, often requiring several coats,” explains Hopkinson.

Shiny and raised
An alternative to foil is thermography. This creates a shiny and slightly raised surface, and is ideal for making text leap out at the customer. Thermography works by sprinkling a powder onto printed ink while it is still wet, after which it is passed through an oven and then UV cured. This causes the ink to rise up off the surface of the paper and gives a shiny finish. Postglow’s Humphrey says that this adds very little to the cost of standard litho printing, making it cheaper than foil. It is also quicker. Humphrey insists that it can actually speed up turnaround times. “Because it is effectively cooked, the ink comes off the machine dry, meaning that the job can be ready for despatch much quicker than if it was left to dry normally.” The cooking process does mean that substrates that melt, such as plastics, cannot be thermographed. And while foil can withstand the thermography process, laminate would melt in the oven.

Peep-throughs
Die-cutting is a technique used for cutting out sections of a piece of printed card or paper, to create a visual effect such as a pop-up or 3D design, or ‘peep-throughs’ to enable people to see through one layer to the next. Die-cutting is performed after a job has been printed. To ensure the cuts fall in the correct place (so the right bit of the design pops up or the exact area that you want to be revealed is) the register of the print has to be perfect. “We had some problems with digital print at first, the register wasn’t exact and colours that were supposed to fall either side of a cut or crease weren’t in the right place,” says Martin Dawkins, owner of Medway Cutters, which specialises in die-cutting. Another consideration with digital printing is that the toner used is more delicate than the ink used in traditional printing. If a piece of digital print has a number of finishes applied, the toner can crack, revealing the paper underneath. When combining digital print and die-cutting it is worth speaking to the finisher about what they would recommend to protect the print. However, as the quality of digital print improves, these issue will be less of a problem.

As turnaround times for printed jobs are getting shorter, trade finishers are having to work to tighter and tighter deadlines. “If jobs are being transported from where they have been printed to where the finishing is being done, it is important to make sure that the ink is completely dry. Otherwise when it’s tightly packed you can get set-off, where the ink from one area marks another area,” adds Dawkins.

From an environmental perspective, none of the processes is especially damaging. If a separate finishing firm is being employed, then transporting the job between the printer and the finisher will add to the carbon footprint. The metal used to make the dies can usually be recycled to make new dies. While in thermography, powder that is not used gets vacuumed off the sheet and recycled back into the powder hopper so that none is wasted.

In an increasingly crowded and competitive market, finishing a job off with a bit of a flourish can make all the difference.