Spot UV printing in Mississauga

The sheet is printed and laminated first. It then runs through the UV coater, which applies a clear photopolymer varnish to the areas you have marked and nowhere else, and passes under a lamp that cures it in a fraction of a second. There is no drying time and no offsetting, so the sheet can be trimmed almost immediately.

“Spot” means partial. Flood UV coats the whole sheet and is a different, much less interesting thing — it protects, it does not contrast. The entire effect here comes from the boundary between the coated area and the uncoated one, which is why the stock underneath matters as much as the varnish on top.

It is a separate pass on a separate machine from the press. That is the practical consequence worth knowing: spot UV adds a step to the schedule and a setup to the cost, so it is cheap per piece on a long run and proportionally expensive on a short one.

Spot UV needs its own artwork. Not a note saying “gloss on the logo” — a separate layer or page, the same size as the card, with the varnish areas in 100% black and everything else left white. Solid black means varnish. White means none. There is no grey: the coater either lays varnish down or it does not, so a 50% tint is not a half-gloss, it is a misread file.

This is the single most common reason a spot UV job sits waiting. The print file arrives, the mask does not, and nothing can be scheduled until it does. If you have not got one we build it from your artwork and show it to you before the run, which takes an afternoon rather than a week.

One detail that catches people: the mask has to be built for the varnish, not copied from the ink. A logo that is knocked out in white on a dark card needs a mask of the logo shape itself, and a hairline that reads fine in ink may need thickening before it will hold varnish. We flag that at proof rather than printing it and hoping.

Spot UV on a gloss-laminated card is close to invisible — gloss on gloss, and the only clue is a faint edge under raking light. The finish exists to be a contrast, so it needs a matte surface to sit against.

Soft-touch lamination is the usual partner and the best one. The card feels like suede, the varnish is hard and bright, and the difference is obvious in the hand before anyone has looked at it properly. Matte lamination is the cheaper version of the same idea and works nearly as well.

It does not work on uncoated stock. There is nothing for the varnish to sit on, so it sinks into the fibres and cures flat and dull — you pay for a finish and get a slightly darker patch. If you want a tactile mark on uncoated paper, that is a blind deboss or a letterpress hit, and both are on the gold foil page.

Standard spot UV is flat. It is glossy, it has a visible edge, and you can feel it with a fingernail if you go looking. On a soft-touch card that is usually enough, because the contrast is doing the work.

Raised spot UV is a thicker build, applied heavier so the varnish stands measurably above the sheet. You feel it immediately rather than finding it — it reads as texture rather than shine. It suits a logo, a monogram, a single rule or a pattern. It does not suit body copy, because thick varnish over small type closes up the counters and the text goes muddy.

Raised costs more and adds to the schedule. If you are deciding between them, the question is whether the mark is meant to be noticed on sight or discovered in the hand. Both are defensible; only one of them is on the quote twice.

You cannot write on it, and you cannot write on the soft-touch around it either. If the back of the card is where you write appointments or quote numbers, leave that side uncoated and put the spot UV on the face only. We will set the job up that way if you say so.

Very fine detail is the other limit. Varnish spreads slightly as it is laid down, so hairlines below about half a point and type below roughly 6pt tend to thicken or close up. The fix is normally to redraw the mask rather than abandon the idea, and we will show you the difference at actual size.

It also will not rescue a weak mark. Spot UV makes a confident shape look deliberate; it makes a cluttered one look cluttered and shiny. If the logo is the problem, the honest answer is the design page, not this one.