Make a lasting impression with foil effects business cards that shine with unlimited custom foil colors. Unlike traditional foil stamping, this innovative process allows you to add halftones, shades, and gradients in foil that bring your design to life with dazzling depth and dimension. Whether you want subtle metallic highlights or bold, shimmering patterns, these cards ensure your brand stands out with elegance and style.
Each foil effects business card is crafted on premium 16pt coated card stock for a durable, high-quality feel. A unique printing method applies full-color inks over a silver foil layer, producing a brilliant spectrum of metallic colors that catch the light from every angle. This means your design is not limited to a single foil shade—you can explore unlimited combinations to match your creative vision.
To complete the look, choose from three luxurious finishes: a soft matte aqueous coating for a smooth and understated effect, a high gloss finish for extra shine, or a UV spot gloss treatment to highlight specific areas of your design with striking contrast.
Perfect for professionals, creatives, and brands that want to stand out, foil effects business cards transform an ordinary handout into a conversation starter. Elevate your networking, showcase your brand’s personality, and leave a memorable impression every time you share your card.
Images or artwork printed with foil effects will darken slightly and some gradient range will be lost. Consider lightening images before printing for a better result.
To create typical silver foil, we recommend applying 15% K over the foil.
Yes, foil effects allows you to design with full coverage and full bleed, unlike foil stamping which is limited 50% of the coverage.
Knockouts are the spaces in the Foil Effects mask or in the CMYK print file. Beware there might be a "halo" of white around the knockout area. Although registration is better than traditional foil stamping, it will not be exact.
Do not design using foil effects on very thin or small text or artwork. For best results, use large areas or fonts 12pt and above. Sans-serif fonts 10 point or above will also work.
A UV coating will bring out more of the foil/CMYK subtleties in your artwork as well as add another dimension of gloss to your design.
Foil effects works best on lighter colors. The darker and more saturated the color is, the less effect the foil effect will have.
Foil Stamping is the true and traditional form of adding foil to your project. Foil stamping is limited to under 50% coverage, cannot bleed and is not suited to complex designs. Foil effects allows almost unlimited foil colors, gradients and can be used for intricate designs. We offer traditional foil stamping on silk laminated and uncoated stocks while foil effects is only printed on a coated card stock.
Coated cards have a thin clay coating that can chip when trimmed. Cards with heavy ink coverage, especially dark colors that goes all the way to the edges, tend to really to show this chipping. We recommend silk laminated cards for designs with heavy coverage at the trim line.
The upside of club-run printing is the shared savings, the downside is that we adjust color globally to get the best overall color for shared jobs. This means the color of club-run printed items will vary through the run and will not match exactly on re-prints. Our Indigo printing service is better suited to color critical work.
Coated cards aren't ideal for writing on. If finished with a matte aqueous coating, sharpies may work if left to dry but ballpoint pens will smudge. If finished with a UV gloss coating, don't even think about it. If this is a big deal, check out our uncoated card stock options.
CMYK Process colors in the grey range and de-saturated images can shift in color throughout the print run and may cause the greys to appear either cooler or warmer. For a neutral grey, we recommend converting all grey values and de-saturated images to true greyscale consisting of K (black) only values.
Due to the nature of club-run printing, you may experience color variation in solid fills of blue. For great blue results, we recommend a 30% difference between your Cyan and Magenta levels to ensure a nice rich dark blue, rather than purple.
For the richest of deep dark blacks in print use 50/40/40/100 as the CMYK value. If printing small black text (or knocked out text), we recommend a k only black (0/0/0/100) to avoid mis-registration issues.
Color on cards finished with a UV gloss coating will appear slightly darker and richer than cards finished with an aqueous coating.
Bleeds: all files must have a 1/8" bleed on each side
Live Area: keep all critical text and artwork 1/8" inside the trim
Colors: supply your files in CMYK color (Pantone/RGB colors will be converted or rejected)
Foil Effects: Include a separate file/artboard with these elements colored with Pantone Black to denote the special finishing. Alternatively, if you would like to include these elements in the same file, place these elements on a separate layer and colored with a Pantone color (typically Pantone Black) that denotes the Foil Effects.
Resolution: 300 dpi minimum (400 dpi preferred)
Fonts: fonts must converted to curves/outlines (we do not accept fonts).
Transparencies: flatten all transparencies
Types Of Files We Accept: MAC & PC files from Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (EPS or AI), CorelDraw (CDR or EPS), Adobe Acrobat PDF, TIFF or JPEG. Foil Effects layers can only be printed from a vector-based file.
| Trim Size | File Size | Template | |
| Square Card | 2" x 2" | 2.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Square Card | 2.5" x 2.5" | 2.75" x 2.75" | DOWNLOAD |
| Name Card | 3.5" x 1.5" | 3.75" x 1.75" | DOWNLOAD |
| Name Card | 3.5" x 1.75" | 3.75" x 2" | DOWNLOAD |
| Business Card | 3.5" x 2" | 3.75" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
Offset Printed Using Stochastic Screens
16pt Coated Card Stock, 30% post-consumer waste (130lb)
Full Color Both Sides (4/4) or Full Color One Side (4/0), using soy-based inks
Foil Effects with Matte or Gloss Coatings
