What is

Digital Foil Printing or Sleeking™?

Are you looking for your offline marketing to standout from your competition and grab your clients or prospects attention?

If you're here, of course you are, and you have come to the right place. so why foils?

Our digital foiling or also known as Sleeking™ solution may be just what your looking for to change your offline marketing from the ordinary to extraordinary!

Digital foil or Why Foils?

Is a new solution that helps us add a bit more sophistication to your marketing material whether it is your business cards, invitations, postcards, box sleeves, stickers, shelf wobblers, book marks, booklet covers and more at a much lower cost than traditional foiling solutions for small runs.

Foiling

Requires no custom dies reducing the set-up costs considerably and is an enhancement that bonds metallic foil to card or paper materials.

Foil is a handsomely crisp and iridescent surface finish, which adds bold contrast making the foiled content stand out from the rest of the product.

Adding foil to business cards is one of the common requests of clients who want to create a statement and a sense of stature and extravagance; it produces a sophisticated touch to your product and adds emphasis to the foiled areas.

Foil is transferred through heat on to the surface of your chosen stock; this makes the area sparkle with a dazzling metallic finish.

The wonderful thing about digital sleeking with foils is that there is a wide selection of colours and finishes for you to choose from.

Although traditionally when most people think of foil they think of gold and silver foils. However there is a large range of colours available to either suit your brand and or project.

The colours of Digital foils is increasing but as standard it already is available in many other colour and holographic.

Applications Include

High-end business cards
Brochures
Marketing Cards
Product Labels
Packaging - Box Sleeves and Boxes
Booklet and Book Covers (Soft Cover only)
Greeting cards
Invites, Variable Data / Personalised foiled print
Presentations & business documents
Calendar Covers
Certificates

Types of Holographic Foils & Laminates

illusion Holographic Foil

Brittle Holographic Laminate

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Our design tips and things to account for when foiling.

To ensure the best quality outcome for your printed and foiled product, it's very important to understand the balance between form, function and the design limitations of working with foil.

Please note that a consideration of digital foiling and while we always aim to minimise, some light foil speckling on your product is normal and is more noticeable on dark solid coloured printed areas.

Tool Tip: It is a good idea to have a paint or dusting brush or even a clean microfibre handy to lightly dust off the product, this can help to remove those speckles although some may remain.
For our digital foiling process we do need to apply a velvet laminate.

Soft touch velvet will soften the image and or colours which will appear more muted than originally printed. It really depends on the quality and type of image and the colours. Sometimes this can be considered a benefit when you want to give more depth to your materials.
Only 250gsm plus stocks with a soft touch velvet laminate is used for our foiling process.
Elements in your design for foil must be created as vector art, rather than png, jpeg or bitmap.
Minimum thickness for foil elements is 0.4mm

Minimum thickness for foil elements is 0.25pt*
The foil process is subject to movement (what is shift) up to 2mm. For this reason we don't recommend foiling elements that are position sensitive. Our foiling process is really only suitable at the moment for embellishing parts of designs where any minor movements (1-2mm) will not really be noticeable or visually detract from the overall design.
Gap between foil and text/ elements not to be foiled over must be more than 2mm
Strong alignment (registration / FIT) between foil and any other cmyk design elements is not recommended as there can be some shift in registration the printing and foiling processes.
Generally a minimum of 6pt font size (Bold) is okay font size for foiling.
It can’t be used as shading or gradient, only as 100% values.
Solid areas: we don’t recommend foiling of completely solid areas (100% coverage) that are more than 150mm x 150mm.
Due to the way digital foil process is applied, areas of foil need to be output at a resolution of 2000dpi rather than the standard requirement of high resolution of 300dpi. If it is less it can result in jagged or uneven foil application.
Due to the custom nature of short run printing and foiling, while everyone one of our jobs goes through a QC process, we do not individually check every printed piece produced in a run and while there is some industry tolerances that we can not guarantee every piece is perfect as there may be on occasion some artifacts or foiled areas that may not be 100% perfect, we generally put extra in just in case.