How to determine your foil stamping area
If you're interested in a quote for foil stamping, we will need to know the foil size area to provide a cost. This can be done one of two ways. First, provide your artwork along with quote request. As long as the artwork is supplied at the final size for foiling, our team will be able to quickly work out the die size and furnish a quote. If your artwork is not finalised yet, you can simply provide the height and width dimensions of the foil area, and we can work from that.
The easiest way to work out the height and width dimensions is to imagine drawing a box around all of your artwork elements that will be foil stamped. In the example below, a pink box has been drawn around the artwork elements intended for foil stamping. If you don't have your artwork, you can choose a height and width for your foil area and send them to us. The most critical element is to ensure that the box around your foil elements includes everything that will be foil stamped as this will be what determines the foil die size.
Step by step guide to working out the foil area
1. Draw a box around your artwork elements, or simply work out the height and width of the area you wish to have foil stamped. For example, if you wanted an A5 foil invitation foil stamped you may decide you want the foil area to be within a 10 x 10cm area.
2. Either supply the height and width along with your quote request or multiply them and provide the final square cm size.
The drawings/images below show two variations for a 50sq cm die size. Multiplying 7cm x 7cm creates a 49sq cm die size but as you can see in the second illustration, you could also use a 13cm x 3.8cm size to create a 49.4sq cm die. Both of these are within our minimum die size of 50 sq cms. You can of course go much larger than this. 50sq cms covers most business cards (assuming you don't need oversized dies) and it's also ideal for a logo to be foil stamped on a letterhead. Whatever die size you need, if you provide this information, along with the final size of your printed product, we will be able to quickly quote the job for you using our estimating software.
Something else to bear in mind is, if your printed item is fairly large, such as a foil blocked letterhead, and you want a foil logo at the top and some foil text at the bottom, then we won't need to order in an A4 size die, which is expensive. In situations like this, it can be more economical to either run the job twice, foiling the logo first and the text at the bottom second, or to simply order in two smaller dies and mount them individually. In cases like this, we recommend reaching out to our friendly team, so we can find the most cost effective way in which to quote your foil stamping job.