Ultra Thick Trading Cards

When you order your printed product with special finishes such as foil stamping or raised foil, please prepare, and submit an extra artwork mask file for Foil finish representation along with your CMYK artwork. This extra artwork file is called Foil Mask File.

Preparing Mask file: Create a black and white pdf file with black color values of K = 100% (C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=100). Black areas represent where you want the foil or raised foil finish to be applied and white means no finish will be applied.

Bleed Area: It is important to know if the artwork that you have designed is supposed to be full bleed or not. If it is supposed to be full bleed, the background/artwork which is close enough to cut-line should extend 0.0625” from all sides beyond the cut line to make the artwork a full bleed.

Cut Line: This line determines the size of your finished product; this is where your artwork will be cut. So, make sure all-important elements such as text, logo and images are not close to this line.

Safety Line: Safety line alerts the designer that All Text, Logo, and important info must be kept inside this line. Info inside the safety line will print correctly and be visible on the final product.

Note: Printer has a 1/16th of an inch shift tolerance that can occur from top, bottom, left to right. Hence, please account for 1/6th of an inch tolerance while designing your artwork.

• Always use solid color behind the Foil application. We do not recommend having any artwork or text under the foil mask since it might be visible through the foil mask.
• Foil Coverage should be no more than 30% of the artwork, otherwise the foil will be wavy and will not look good. The only time a 50% coverage is acceptable is with patterns, thin strokes, or small shapes. Ideally, the size of the area, shape or image covered with raised foil should not exceed 1in x 1in.
• We do not recommend having fonts smaller than 10pt on the Raised Foil Artwork. However, if you use fonts with thicker strokes or bold fonts, we do not recommend having fonts smaller than 12pt.

The file formats are acceptable for uploads are TIF, .TIFF, .EPS, .AI, .PSD, .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, .PDF. We mostly recommend .pdf files.

For best quality print results, it is advisable that your files are designed in a Vector Based application such as Illustrator or Corel Draw and resolution of all images, logo is at least 300 dpi.