Hot Foil Printing Limitations

Hot foil gives our Frosted Clear and Satin Black plastic cards a premium metallic finish, but it's a different process to standard full-colour card printing, and it comes with some real constraints. Worth knowing before you send over your artwork.

No gradients, halftones, tints or photographs

Hot foil only prints solid, flat colour. Gradients, halftones, tints and photographs simply won't reproduce — the process can't hold that kind of detail. Your artwork needs to be "line art": clean solid shapes with hard edges, no fading or blending. If your design relies on a photo or a gradient background, hot foil isn't the right process for it.

Up to 4 colours, no CMYK or Pantone matching

You can print up to 4 colours, chosen from our range of 42 metallic and pigment foils. There's no full-colour (CMYK) printing and no Pantone colour matching with hot foil — you're picking from our existing foil colours, not matching to an exact brand colour. If exact colour matching matters for your logo, factor that in early.

Small text and fine detail will fill in

Fine detail and small wording don't hold up well under hot foil. A logo with intricate detail at around 10mm will likely fill in and lose definition when printed. Keep text and logos bold and simple, and avoid anything with thin lines or small type if you want it to stay legible.

Keep ink coverage moderate

Large solid blocks of foil — a full-width colour bar, for example — can print unevenly or look patchy rather than crisp and solid. Smaller, more contained areas of colour print far more reliably than large solid fills.

Printable area

On a standard 86 x 54mm card, the printable area for hot foil is 86 x 48mm. Nothing can print within 3mm of the top and bottom edges of the card — keep any critical text or logos clear of that margin.

We'll check your artwork before we print

Send your artwork over and we'll check it's suitable for hot foil before anything goes to print — free of charge. If something won't work (too much fine detail, a gradient, tight margins), we'll flag it and suggest a fix rather than printing it as-is.