Metallic ink cards

Until now, adding a gold or silver ink to your printing has required a custom quote and a special custom print run. Due to popular demand however we have now created a metallic ink card product!

By printing similar orders together in one print run we are able to keep the costs down and pass on the savings to you. Add a metallic gold or silver ink to your artwork today!
*Limited to 220kg matt coat/180kg coat papers at business card size or A6 size.

Read more about creating artwork for metallic ink cards here

Metallic foil cards

For an even shinier, metallic look than a printed ink, why not try a metallic foil card? The foil is not printed onto your artwork, but hot stamped onto it once the initial printing has been completed. A special die is created from your design and this is then pushed onto the surface of the paper with a thin layer of metallic gold or silver foil in between. The results are simply gorgeous! Perfect for that glitzy greeting card look.
Read more about creating artwork for metallic foil cards here

Load the swatches

The first thing to do is load a silver and gold ink swatch into the Illustrator color swatch palette. To make your life easier, simply download the swatches here and then load them into your document by selecting the swatch file (gold-silver.ase) from your desktop. Use the contextual menu from the Swatch palette > Open Swatch Library > Other Library… [select the file to load].

About the inks

We print using the DIC621 for the silver ink and our own unique special blend Mojoprint Gold for the gold ink. You may define the gold ink using DIC620 if you don’t use our swatches, but please understand that we will use our own gold ink to print regardless and that may differ in hue to the DIC620 color chart. For purists that must have DIC620 as the gold color, please contact us for a quote.

Select and color the objects

With your swatches now in place, you simply need to select the objects you wish to print in silver or gold (you must select one or the other and not define both in the same artwork) and click on the swatch to color those objects. Now, when we output your artwork to plates a 5th plate will be created for the metallic ink objects in your data since the color has been defined using a SPOT color.

Careful of 100% black

If your design uses a black element on top of the silver or gold, be sure to color it using a rich black (C30, M30, Y30, K100) and not just K 100%. K100% is automatically overprint (to improve text legibility) and if overprint onto your silver or gold it the finished prints may not turn out as expected.
Read more about Rich Black here.

If use 100% K black on top of your silver or gold ink, the black will overprint.

Avoid this by defining the black as a rich black.

We are now offering this custom finish as a new product, Metallic foil cards, available in business card and A6 postcard size — perfect for your own festive creations!

Here we will show you how to prepare your data for metallic foiling.

It is important to understand that the foil is stamped to the design *after* the printing process and not during or before. With that being the case, we need to create two separate files: Our design file (that gets printed) and our die file (that gets stamped), both with identical crop and bleed marks so that it all lines up.

A representation of how the finished product might look and the two files used to create it

Design your card as per any normal job, making sure you have a 3mm bleed and are using either one of our templates or have set up the crop and bleed marks correctly.

While the design that will be printed can be any kind of data you like (bitmap or vector) the design to be stamped *must* be Adobe Illustrator vector data.

Define the area to be foiled using black (100% K), and only solid fills and no strokes or gradients. If you have used strokes you will need to outline them. Be careful not to use text below 6pt in size and stay clear from very fine or detailed patterns since they will most likely not foil well, if at all.

Once you are happy with the design, save it with the name ‘design’. Then group and cut all the 100% K elements from it (the areas to be foiled), re-save so that your ‘design’ file now only has the printed design in it.

Then delete all the remaining elements and paste in place (shift + command v) the 100% K black foil design elements. This will ensure they paste back exactly where you cut them from. Now save the file with a new name ‘die’ or ‘foil’ etc.

You should be left with two files, one that has the black foil elements, and one that has the design to be printed.

Order your cards, submit your two data files and simply let us know if you would like gold or silver foil. Happy foiling.

In an attempt to ease congestion during the busy morning period and ensure a smooth production flow at the factory we are asking our customers to please submit their orders (and data) before 10am. We are adjusting our office hours to provide email and phone support from the earlier time of 9am.

If your job is time critical and simply *must* go into that given day’s run, rather than scramble at 9:59am we urge you to submit your order the night before since in many cases there may be an issue with the data that needs to be fixed before your file can be accepted as print-ready.

A new warning message will be included into the order process to remind you of the new deadline before submitting your order online.

We thank you for your understanding.

The exact date of the changeover is dependent on stocks of our current paper but rest assured that we will not print half of your order on current stock and half on the new stock!

What you do need to be prepared for however is that printing the same data this week and again in a month’s time may result in you having flyers on two different stocks. While barely noticeable to most, the discerning paper connoisseur may detect the paper whiteness discrepancy and notice that the whiter paper has resulted in slightly different colors than the original print run on our current stock.

This change effects all products printed on 70kg, 90kg, 110kg and 135kg coat papers.

Your initial plan may be to create a template file and then use that as a master to create a new file for each employee. Time consuming, but it will get the job done. You will end up with 130 files though (or 260 if you make a new one for both front and back) and a nightmare of a scenario if the boss suddenly says he wants to change the font/color/logo at the last minute…

Fear not. By using the powerful data merge features of InDesign you can set up just one template file and have InDesign read the employee information from an external spreadsheet. Updates to either design or content are then a breeze.

Here’s how we can do it.

Create a spreadsheet

First you will need a data source. That is, all the names and email addresses and job titles etc. of all the employees. You can even include images if you like. Perhaps a mugshot of each employee or a QR-code for example. We set all that up in our spreadsheet. For the sake of this example we will use Microsoft Excel.

Decide on the fields you will need on your business card. We’ll have First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Email, Portrait. In the first row of your spreadsheet we use these fields as our column headers. Then we go through and write the actual values for each employee on a new row.

Working with images

The only tricky part is including images. We don’t paste the actual image into our spreadsheet, merely include the path to them on our local drive. This way InDesign will read the path and pull in the image directly. This gives the added benefit that we can edit the image whenever we like and along as the path remains the same, the most up-to-date file will always appear in InDesign.

The trick is to first define which column in our spreadsheet is our image field by adding an @ symbol before the column name. E.g. @portrait. Excel isn’t happy about you typing those kinds of symbols into a cell however and will complain with an error. To get around it we must escape the character using an apostrophe. So, we type ‘ in front of the @ sign and Excel will then behave.

To avoid image path issues, I recommend saving the data file, the images and the InDesign template file all in the same folder. Your path in the spreadsheet will then need only be something like filename.jpg, without the need for slashes, folder names and volumes etc. but you can just as easily write ‘images/filename.jpg’ if you want to put the images in their own folder.

Export the spreadsheet data

The last step in setting up the data file is to export the Excel file to a format InDesign can read. A tab delimited text file works best. Simply select file > save as… and in the drop down list of file formats select ‘Tab delimited text file’. Name the file as you wish, in our example we’ll name it as staff.txt.
NOTE: If using Japanese or other non-latin characters export using the UTF-16 text file format.

Import the data into InDesign

Now we get to play with InDesign. Create a new 2 page document, business card size (91 x 55mm for Japanese standard size cards) and include the 3mm bleed in the options like good little designers.

Design your business card just as you normally would, formatting the type and arranging the logo and colors etc. to your heart’s desire.

Next, navigate to Window > Utilities > Data Merge and in the little palette that pops up, click on Select Data Source… in the contextual panel menu. Browse for the data file you created earlier and load it as the data source.

Set up placeholders

You will now see a list of all the column headers in your spreadsheet. Now we set up placeholder text using the fields in the list. To do this, we simply select some text in our design that want swapped out and then click on the field we want to appear there from the list. The text will get swapped out with a placeholder like this <>. Now repeat this for all the parts of your design that you want to be populated by your data file. In our case, this will be the First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Email and Portrait.

Set up the data merge and watch the magic

From the palette contextual menu, select Content Placement Options… and for Image Placement check the Center in Frame and Link Images boxes and for Fitting, select Fit Images proportionally. The other boxes can be left unchecked.

Click on Preview in the Data Merge palette and check that the data is being read in as you expected. If it all looks good, click on Create Merged Document. What this will do is save a new version of your InDesign file for you with as many pages as necessary to generate all the business cards.
Click the radio button to ensure All Records in your data file will be used and then OK. InDesign will do its thing and a new file will appear in a new tab.

Export to PDF

Scroll through the file and if everything looks good, you can either generate a light, low resolution PDF to send to the client for approval or select a press-ready PDF format and create a file with all the bleed and marks as required by your printer.

Now when the client comes back and says they would prefer the text in red and 2 point larger, you only have to edit the one template file and generate the data merge document again since all the placeholders have been created and the data source linked. Or, if they decide they need 5 more employees or something is spelled incorrectly etc., you need just edit and save the Excel data file, update the data source (contextual menu > Update Data Source) and re-export again.