3 Reasons to Use Hot Foiling on Your Prints

No matter what you’re printing, you’ll want the final artwork to grab people’s attention and convey your message. From menus and flyers to posters and roller banners, using the right combination of print techniques can elevate your artwork and increase the impact it has.

For businesses, printing is the ultimate form of offline marketing. With the potential to increase brand awareness, generate new business and cultivate brand loyalty, you’ll want to ensure your prints are designed and produced to maximum effect.

When you use hot foiling to enhance your prints, you can be sure to draw the eye. While hot foil is certainly attention-grabbing, it has many more benefits. If you’re designing artwork or preparing new prints for the summer season, take a look at three reasons why hot foiling should be a key part of your plans:

1. Stand out from the crowd

When you want your brand to be seen, hot foiling is a great way to engage your target audience. If you’re designing product packaging, for example, you’ll need artwork that can stand out among hundreds of other similar products on the shelf.

By adding foil to your packaging, you can ensure that customers see your product before any others. The properties of the material mean that both natural and artificial light is easily reflected. This draws an individual’s attention to your brand or product and is the first step towards them reaching out and picking your product up.

Of course, it isn’t just product packaging that benefits from hot foiling. In any environment that you’re competing with other brands, adding hot foiling to your offline marketing material helps to ensure your content, artwork and design is more meaningful, eye-catching and impactful.

2. Add luxury to premium brands

If you want to elevate your brand and highlight the premium nature of your products or services, hot foiling is a great option for your prints. Many people assume that hot foiling is only used when you want to add bright or garish adornments to a substrate. However, the effects of hot foil can be far more subtle.

With pearlescent and pastel shades, you can add hot foiling to letterheads, business cards and stationery without detracting from the rest of your content. Additional effects, such as holograms, antique styling and iridescent finishes, can also be used to tailor your hot foil prints and create bespoke artwork that showcases the quality of your prints and your brand.

3. Make prints more tactile

A major advantage of offline marketing is the ability to literally put your brand into the hands of your target audience. With flyers, direct mail or business cards, for example, your target demographic can feel the qualities associated with your brand, rather than simply seeing content on a screen.

When you combine hot foiling with other print effects, you can use this to your advantage. Embossing is particularly effective when used in conjunction with hot foiling, as it allows the foiled area of your print to be slightly raised. This invites the recipient to feel the artwork, rather than simply looking at it, and helps to make them more engaged with your content.

How to Use Hot Foiling for Maximum Impact

When you’re designing any artwork for your business, it’s important to do so with your target audience in mind. Consider how your audience will be viewing your prints and design accordingly. A close-up view of a flyer is wildly different from seeing a large format poster in the distance, for example, so your artwork and text will need to be adapted accordingly. While it’s important for your marketing materials to complement one another and deliver the same brand message, they need to do so in a way that reflects the type of print that’s being used.

Hot foiling is the ideal printing technique to highlight specific areas of your print. A gold outline on lettering creates a subtle but unmissable finish, for example. Alternatively, use hot foiling to frame prints or to make logos and lettering stand out.

Use Hot Foil Specialists for Perfect Prints

Whether you’re designing your prints in-house or using an external designer to create bespoke artwork for your business, you’ll need to work with a print specialist that has experience with hot foiling. Furthermore, you’ll want to locate a print firm that can offer a wide variety of choice when it comes to colors, effects and finishes. An experienced printer can provide all the advice you need in terms of placement and styles, so be sure to discuss your ideas with them in advance and use their expertise to help you design award-winning artwork that will engage your audience and showcase your brand at its best.