Foil printing adds a beautiful shiny accent to your printed matter. But foil printing requires a cliché, a brass template that is used to press the desired text, shape or design into the paper. How is such a cliché actually made?
Like just about everything else these days, clichés – or stamps – cannot really be categorised under a single heading. They come in different materials, manufactured using different processes and techniques. However, the most commonly used are clichés in etched magnesium and brass, the latter being particularly popular. ‘A brass stamp is very easy to customise,’ says Rosita Van Unen of Repro Hermans, a specialist in Rotterdam. ‘You can work on it in great detail and adjust it almost endlessly until you achieve the desired effect.’
Within its brass product range, Repro Hermans distinguishes between foil stamps (the standard cliché for shiny foil), embossing stamps (adding relief to your printed matter) and foil embossing stamps (combining both techniques). Rosita Van Unen: “The basis of the creative process is always the same. We receive a PDF from the customer, which we import into a special engraving programme. The PDF must be black and white, otherwise the system will not accept it. If it is coloured, we adjust the colour. The same applies to files with a different encoding. We also have to convert these to the correct format first. So getting started can be very easy, but you still have some work to do in Adobe Illustrator first.”
Rosita creates a simulation of the cliché in the engraving programme. It is important to check which milling cutter size will be used for the actual machining. ‘Let’s assume a milling cutter of 0.1 mm,’ she says. “Then we first have to see which parts are large enough to be engraved with the CNC machine and which are too small. Some details require such meticulous treatment that additional processing with the laser is necessary. If we didn’t do that, we would run the risk of a distorted result. So we select the smallest parts of the file that the milling cutter cannot pass through and convert them into a laser file.”
The cliché is first engraved with the CNC machine, as finely as possible. “In some cases, this step is sufficient. For a very detailed file, we then move on to the laser machine. There, we engrave the stamp again, so that even the finest particles are burned away. Actually, you should engrave the entire file that way. That would be the best result. But that is not desirable, neither for the customer nor for us. The laser burns away microscopic pieces of 0.02 mm per focal point. If you make a cliché that way, it will easily take two weeks. I don’t think anyone would want to pay that cost.”
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