Case study: Foiling in Love
Job description
To create a standalone sample label design that promotes HP Indigo digital print technology and our high-end embellishment finishing capabilities. These were to be produced during the HP Open House event held at Bakers on Thursday 7th July 2022.
The print design had to include HP Indigo Smartstream technologies, Mosaic and Collage. Finish was to include hot foiling and silkscreen. As the wine label market is a big player in the high end label world, we used a wine paper material, Tinteretto Gesso.
Digitally printing labels with HP Indigo
Although we were creating a wine label, we didn’t restrict ourselves to anything you’d expect to see on a wine label. In fact, there’s absolutely no mention of wine at all! No grape type, country of origin, year, volume or alcohol content. The design was purely to give a platform for showing off what we could do. We’ll leave the really clever and creative designing to the professionals. Having established the hot air balloon theme, we decided to use Mosaic to fill two of the balloons.
HP Smartstream Mosaic
Mosaic seed files must be square, vectored pdf file of a detailed random pattern. The look and feel of the design can be lost if the seed file doesn’t have enough small details or the scaling is set too high. One design can use multiple seed files to select from. Here are a few of the seed files used for the small hot air balloons.
Different balloons on every label
While maintining the overall branding of the design, the different pattern on each hot air balloon pairing means every label is randomly unique. HP Smartstream Designer technology selected from a range of installed seed file patterns then applied cropping, scaling and rotation. Shuffling spot colours is also an option but we didn’t use that in this instance.
Watch the birdy!
HP Smartstream collage was used to give a very subtle change to the movement of the flock of white birds. We kept the lead and anchor birds static and created an area that the seed images of the white birds could fly around in. With minimum and maximum quantities, scaling and rotation we were able to achieve a verysimple but classy effect.
HP Mosaic and Collage Toolkit
We’ve put together a toolkit to explain how it works in more detail.
Foiling and Varnishing the Labels
It’s clear from the title that the foiling of this label was to play a key part in its design. Having decided to go with hot foiling, as opposed to cold or digital foiling we reached out to UEI Falcontec. We wanted to include two different foil colours in one pass. In addition, the foiling was to be both detailed and intricate in some areas, while also heavy and bold in others. In fact not just bold, but to use a UEI Unifraxion® die for added wow factor. They were more than up to the challenge and worked closely with us to refine the idea, with great results.
Our ABG Series 3 Digicon is well equipped for high end embellishments. The 50 tonne Big Foot for hot foiling and embossing was in action, as was the flat bed silk screen to produce the snow capped mountains.
Unifraxion® die
Labels on press with 2 foils
Detailed and Unifraxion® foiling
Trade Label Samples
These labels will be added to our extensive range of unbranded trade label samples, free for trade customers. You can request our sample packs by giving us a call on 01277 281900 or by filling in the sample pack request form.
Enhance Digital Print with Label Embellishments
If you have a label job that needs a little bit extra wow to make the product really stand out, Bakers can help.