Gold foil business cards in Mississauga

A die is engraved with your artwork, mounted, and brought up to temperature. A roll of foil — a polyester carrier holding a micro-thin layer of metal and an adhesive — passes between the die and the sheet. The press closes, the heat releases the adhesive, and the pressure transfers the metal to the paper and nowhere else.

Two things follow from that. The first is that foil is opaque: unlike ink, it sits on top of the stock rather than soaking into it, so gold on a black card reads as gold rather than as a muddy yellow. The second is that the die leaves an impression. On a 32pt sheet you can feel the artwork from the back, and that impression is half of what people are responding to when they say a card feels expensive.

It also means foil has a fixed setup cost and a variable one. The die is made once. After that, every reorder of the same artwork is press time only, which is why the second run of a card costs meaningfully less than the first.

Foil needs a surface that will hold an impression. A 16pt C2S card takes a clean strike and is the most common choice for a straightforward foiled business card. An 18pt uncoated sheet takes a deeper impression and is what most people actually picture when they think of letterpress and foil work — the tooth of the paper is visible around the metal.

The 32pt painted-edge stock is two 16pt sheets bonded with a colour running through the middle, cut so that colour shows as a line around the whole card. Paired with a foil stamp on the face it is the heaviest thing we make, and it is the one that gets kept in a wallet rather than a drawer.

What does not take foil well is anything already coated in a heavy varnish or laminate. If a card is going to be soft-touch laminated and foiled, the foil goes on last, over the laminate — tell us at quote stage, because it changes the die and the order of operations.

Foil runs from 250 pieces. That is not a policy we picked; it is where the die and the make-ready stop dominating the cost. Below 250 you are paying mostly for setup, and we would rather tell you that than take the order.

If you need fewer than 250 — twenty invitations, a handful of certificates — the honest answer is usually digital print with a metallic toner, which we also run and which costs a fraction of a foil setup. It is not the same finish and we will not pretend it is, but for a short run it is the right call and we will say so on the phone.

Above 250 the per-piece cost falls quickly. A thousand foiled cards is not four times the price of two hundred and fifty, because the die is already made and the press is already set.

Foil is a solid-or-nothing process. There is no such thing as a 40% tint of gold — the metal either transfers or it does not — so gradients, drop shadows and soft edges have to be redrawn as solid shapes before a die can be cut. We do that redraw as part of the job rather than sending your file back.

Fine detail is where foil jobs go wrong. Hairlines below about 0.5pt and type below roughly 6pt tend to fill in or break up, because the heated foil spreads very slightly under pressure. A Didone typeface with hairline serifs — the sort of thing that looks best in foil — is exactly the case that needs checking before the die is made, and we will proof it at size rather than guess.

Send vector artwork: PDF, AI or EPS with live vectors and fonts outlined. Everything else on this floor accepts 300dpi raster as a fallback; foil does not, because a die is cut from paths and a raster file has none.

The three processes use the same press and the same kind of die, which is why they are usually quoted together. A blind deboss is the die without the foil — the impression only, no colour, which reads as restraint rather than absence. Letterpress is the same idea with ink instead of metal, pressed into the sheet rather than laid onto it.

The combination people ask for most is a foiled logo with the rest of the card blind debossed or letterpressed in a single colour. Because it is one pass per element, each one adds press time, and a three-process card takes about twice as long on the floor as a straight foil. Worth knowing when you are working back from a launch date.

Edge painting is the fourth option and is done after trimming. It works on 32pt only, and it is the finish that makes a stack of cards look like a single object.