Spot gloss business cards elevate your brand with shimmering clear elements printed on top of your full colour artwork. Clubcard Vancouver prints these spot gloss business cards on sturdy, 16pt card stock with a matte coated surface that contrasts perfectly with clear varnish elements.
Unlike cards printed with full UV gloss coverage, we only print the clear UV spot varnish in the areas you desire. Many clients use spot gloss to enhance logos, specific sections of their art and to create unique patterns that appear with light and movement.
We offer several standard business cards sizes, but f you don't see the size you need, please have a look at our small and large spot gloss card options. Still can't find what you need? Click on the custom project tab above and we will send a custom size estimate within one business day.
How We Print These Cards 16ptt spot gloss business cards are printed on a "club-run" where several clients' jobs are combined on a shared offset printing press sheet. This process requires a 9-day production process and cannot be rushed.Coated cards have a thin clay coating that can chip when trimmed. Cards with heavy ink coverage, especially dark colours that goes all the way to the edge tend to really to show this chipping. We recommend silk laminated cards on cards with heavy coverage at the trim line.
The upside of club-run printing is the shared savings, the downside is that we adjust colour globally to get the best overall colour for shared jobs. This means the colour 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 colour 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.
Due to the nature of club-run printing, you may experience colour 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.
CMYK Process colours in the grey range and de-saturated images can shift in colour 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.
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 misregistration issues.
Colours under the spot UV areas will appear slightly darker and richer than areas of the card that is not.
Because there may be some slight shifting of the spot UV (spot gloss), we do not advise putting the spot UV over the text. You can expect up to 1/16" variance between the gloss and the CMYK layers, so trying to line up the thin gloss with small or thin text underneath may not turnout as expected.
Spot gloss doesn't always line up 100% perfect. Usually "blind" spot gloss applications turn out the best. Aligning the spot gloss with CMYK elements often reduces the contrast of the spot gloss and any shift in alignment is noticeable. Spot gloss alone provides great contrast when applied over a solid fill or even just on the white matte stock. Another great effect is to have a pattern in just spot gloss in the background.
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
Colours: supply your files in CMYK colour (Pantone/RGB colours will be converted or rejected)
Spot Gloss: Please include a separate file indicating spot gloss, using a single solid colour fill, typically 100% black or a custom spot colour. Alternatively, if you prefer to spot gloss in the same file, place it on a separate layer or artboard, marked with a single solid colour fill denoting the name for each element. Ensure alignment with CMYK artwork when necessary.
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.
| Trim Size | File Size | Template | |
| 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 Colour Both Sides (4/4) or Full Colour One Side (4/0), using soy-based inks
Matte Aqueous Coated with Spot UV (one or two sides)
