Custom Foil Printing

What is Foil Printing?

Foil printing adds a reflective finish to specific areas of a printed piece. Unlike traditional foil stamping, Smartpress uses a digital Sleeking™ process, which uses heat and pressure to fuse foil to printed ink rather than directly to the paper. This creates a brighter, more reflective finish than metallic ink.

Digital Sleeking also provides more design flexibility than traditional foil stamping. Because the process does not require a custom metal die, it can reproduce fine details and complex designs.

Smartpress offers digital foil printing in a handful of colors, including gold, rose gold, silver and holographic. Clear spot gloss is also available and allows the color printed underneath it to show through, while adding a glossy, reflective finish.

Foil Products

You can add foil to a variety of printed products. Take a look at our selection here: Foil Printing. Digital foil products all come finished with Soft Touch laminate, which adds a smooth, suede-like feel while helping protect the printed piece from wear.

Foil can also be added to other products through a Custom Quote. For example, you can request gold foil printing announcements, silver foil printing on save the date cards and foil on other custom products.

Print-Ready Files & Foil

When preparing your print-ready files and placing your order, clearly indicate which areas of your artwork should receive foil. You can specify foil in either of these ways:

• Add dedicated foil layers to your file. See How to Add Foil for instructions.
• Provide foil instructions with your order.

When saving your PDF, include layers and vector graphics for the areas where foil will be applied. Vector artwork helps preserve fine details and clean edges. If you need help preparing your file, contact customer service and our print experts will be happy to help.

Foil Printing Design Ideas

Keep these tips in mind when designing a project with foil:

• Foil works best on coated paper stocks, such as coated matte, coated gloss or coated semigloss 2 sides (C2S).
• Avoid uncoated or textured stocks, as well as text-weight stocks.
• Avoid extremely thin lines and very small fonts when designing foil elements.
• Combine any foil color with black or full-color ink to create contrast and visual depth.
• Use foil as an accent for scripted fonts, headlines and other text.
• Try using a full flood of foil in the negative space of your design for high-contrast effects.
• Foil can be added to one side of cards and invitations. For folded pieces, foil can be added to both the front and back, but not the interior.

Video Tutorial: How to Design With Foil Printing & Other Specialty Finishes

Learn how to design with foil and other finishes with our School of Print Design video series.