Spot gloss printing of small size, square and narrow cards on 16pt card matte stock allows you to highlight areas of your artwork with a clear high gloss coating that is printed in just the places you want it. Spot gloss, also called spot UV or spot varnish, attracts attention when your card catches the light and it reflects on the matte/gloss spaces.
We offer several standard sizes of cards that are great for unique business cards, hang tags, trading cards and promotional cards. If you don't see the exact card size on our list of standard sizes, click on the custom estimate tab and we'll be happy to send a custom quote asap.
How We Print These Cards
These cards are printed in our US print shop on a "club-run" where several clients' jobs are combined on a shared 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: Include a separate file/artboard with these elements coloured 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 coloured with a Pantone colour (typically Pantone Black) that denotes the Spot Gloss.
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 | 1.75" x 1.75" | 2" x 2" | UNAVAILABLE |
| 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 |
| Hang Tag | 4" x 2" | 4.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Trading Card | 4" x 2.75" | 4.25" x 3" | DOWNLOAD |
| Square Card | 3" x 3" | 3.25" x 3.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Trading Card | 4" x 3" | 4.25" x 3.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Promo Card | 4" x 3.5" | 4.25" x 3.75" | DOWNLOAD |
| Hang Tag | 5" x 2" | 5.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Square Card | 4" x 4" | 4.25" x 4.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Hang Tag | 6" x 2" | 6.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Bookmark | 7" x 2" | 7.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Bookmark | 8" x 2" | 8.25" x 2.25" | DOWNLOAD |
| Club Flier | 5" x 3.5" | 5.25" x 3.75" | UNAVAILABLE |
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)
