Foil on Acrylic

Foil on acrylic is a distinctive blend of sleek, modern aesthetics with traditional luxury. It's often used as a cap stone element in an over the top suite, and for good reason. Gold foil on black, white or clear is timeless, and striking, but it’s only the beginning of what you can do. Combining specialty acrylics, like pearls, metallics and marbles with the nearly limitless foil options can create truly distinctive, and one of a kind looks.

What to Know

Lead Time: 7-10 Business Days from Final Approval
Potential Sources of Delay: Sourcing uncommon or rare specialty acrylics
Variable Data: No*

More Information

We do these with a die based, hot foil process. The plus side of doing it this way is that we can generally capture finer text and script elements than you can with cold processes, and you tend to get good adhesion and less filling of elements, and loss of fine details like serifs. The down sides are the same as any die based process. Namely, that variable data, while not impossible, requires adding another finishing process, be it a Calligrapher, or flatbed printing, etc. Additionally, die costs are calculated per square inch. As they get larger, mechanical requirements change, and presses that can handle them ( and can still be safely hand fed ) become less common, all of which mean that larger pieces can get expensive very quickly.

Material costs go up quickly as well. Aside from simply being a more expensive substrate than paper, acrylic items also have a much higher failure rate. While you may not realize it, paper is a precision engineered product. Its thickness, and mechanical properties are tightly defined, and meticulously managed to be consistent from sheet to sheet, roll to roll, batch to batch, year over year. A variation of a few thousandths of an inch, or poor surface condition can literally ruin a print run unless the press operator is expecting it. Acrylic, on the other hand, can vary as much as +/-10% in thickness - within the same sheet - and still be within production specifications. Unlike paper, it also has a rigid surface. Hit a piece with a low spot, and you don’t get a transfer. Hit a piece on a large enough high spot, and it shatters. In practical terms, what this means is that we have to produce significantly more parts than we actually need in order to ensure we can deliver perfect ones… which makes for a more expensive product.

A die based process also means that small quantities are inherently costly. The complex set up takes most of the time, and requires an extremely skilled operator. This means that stamping 10 pieces doesn’t require much less time, or labor than stamping 100, or more - and that going “back on press” is more or less doing the whole job again. While that is mostly our problem, and not yours, we still highly recommend including some overs in your quantity. If your client wants another, or one gets dropped and scratched, we cannot guarantee that we will have “A” grade extras every time.