How To Set Up A Spot UV Business Card Design

The process of setting up a Spot UV business card is different from what you are used to. Since the Spot UV coating is not actually “printed”, the area that is printed and the area that is Spot UV will require separate files.

Areas with UV (Spot) and Areas with No UV

Let’s make it clear, the purpose of spot UV coating is to cover only certain graphic areas on the card, not the whole flat side of the card. Think of it as highlighting the important parts of your business card so that they stand out. Not only that, but you can get really creative with spot UV coating and make a business card that leaves a lasting impression on the viewer.

 

The Printed Area

The printed area of the card doesn’t need any special layers or effects to prepare it for spot UV coating. The only thing you will do special might be to leave out certain objects that you might want to be spot UV only, without any printing under it giving it that “Ghost” effect.

Spot UV Coating Business Card - Ghost Effect

 

In this example, the “m” was left out of the printing, only a solid orange was printed saturating the entire back side. The spot UV coating was applied to render the “Ghost” effect to the “m” and you can only see it in the light at certain angles… this is one of the owner’s business cards, we get WOW’s every time and most customers want it for their business cards.

 Spot UV and Printed Area Demonstration - M

The Spot UV Area

Believe it or not, it’s not that difficult to make a Spot UV file for the business card. Think of it this way, the UV coating is simply a clear color that you can put over any object in your design. Therefore, all you need to do is use black (100% K) representing the areas where the UV coating will be applied. Anything that is left white in the spot UV file will NOT have UV applied to it. Anything that is black (100% K), will. Simple as that.

[note color=”#d1d7c7″]I would not recommend doing this in Photoshop since the layer would be rasterized creating a jagged edge, use Illustrator which creates a vector layer instead for nice crisp clear edges.[/note]

 

Spot UV Coating Layer

The logo on the front of the card is important to us so we wanted it to stand out. How did we do it? Spot UV of course! It just jumps out at you when you’re looking at the card.

 Spot UV and Printed Area Demonstration Logo

[note color=”#FFCC00″] Once you have setup your Spot UV business cards. Give us a call at 1877-mmprint to speak printing professional about your project or visit our Business Card Printing Page for more information and to request a quote. [/note] [divider top=”1″]

3 Printing Mistakes That Are Costing You Money

Making educated decisions with your marketing is not only about the results but also how those results are obtained. By knowing how printing works and what combinations of specs work best, you can actually save money on printing costs and still have quality marketing materials.

I can imagine that you are probably thinking right now…I have enough on my plate as it is, now I have to learn how printing works too???

Well, not exactly. Really, an honest and knowledgeable printing company will steer you in the right direction, save you money and educate you on the way. We firmly believe that an educated customer will become the best customer because the communication is clear and the results will be exactly as discussed. No one losses, no reprints, no extra fees, it’s all win-win.

Save Money On Printing With These 3 Tips

Here are 3 mistakes that we come across pretty often when customers that are not familiar with printing. You can take these as rules for optimizing your next print run:

Overdesign And The Printed Space

Overdesign is not a real word according to my spell check which underlines it with a big red squiggly line, but it does exist in real life (and in the dictionary) and it can cause eye fatigue, confusion and a general loss of interest. Overdesign is found when you pick up some kind of printed material and can’t seem to stop moving your eyes or focus on a specific part of the design. It takes you away from the important parts like calls to action.

Some people carry on with the misconception that white space is wasted space. Nothing is further from the truth. One company that takes advantage of white space is Apple. If you look at their advertising, packaging and devices, white space prevails. Hey, just look at how they’ve dominated every corner of the market… they know that it works; white space is aesthetically pleasing and keeps the viewer focused on the main point of the advertisement.

So how is overdesign costing you money that you could be saving on printing?

A great example is when restaurants print menus. A menu’s main goal is to present a customer with the different plates and combinations of food available for purchase. But, the method of distributing the menu varies and that is where less can be more. There are menus that are handed out or included with take-out orders. Then, you have menus that are used for dine-in customers which are collected after the order has been taken.

A carry-out menu could be a simpler one or two color menu that will cost you less to print. Think of Chinese food menus, they are usually printed in red and black ink and have zero pictures in them. Yet, they are highly effective.

Your table menus, if designed efficiently, can be smaller or take less pages to include all of your items. Less pages or smaller size means less paper which saves money.

Choosing Paper Stocks

Paper is another area where customers over do it and spend extra money unnecessarily. Consider how the print piece will be used. Does your brochure contain information that is read once and discarded or is there a piece of information in it that you know your readers will go back and reference more than once? These are the kind of things that need to be considered. If your brochure is the kind that gets tossed after one use, you probably want to hold back on using a heavy Linen cardstock. It’s simply throwing money away.

If you and your service or product require the best and only the best, then make sure the content of your printed pieces are worth more than just a look, make them contain value, make them worth keeping.

Qualifying Quantity

Most of the cost of a print run is in the setup. So many things go into setting up for a printing job that adding paper one setup is complete, it’s not a big deal. This is why you may see that the cost difference from 2500 to 5000 pieces is very little in most cases.  Determine if you can use more in the future instead of just a few now and save money. Make sure your design doesn’t have any references to dates that might render your prints useless in the future.


By making minor changes to your design, paper and/or quantity, you can make a big difference in the cost of your printing.

Make sure to give us a call if you have any questions about your next printing project, one of our specialists can help you determine the best and most effective way of producing your project. 1877-667-7468.

Free Christmas Fonts For Commercial Use

 

Christmas is almost here and we know that designers have tight deadlines for Christmas projects. We put together a list of awesome FREE Christmas fonts for commercial use that you can use in your designs for personal or commercial projects like holiday greeting cards, envelopes, postcards and any other fun Holiday projects you are working on. If you use any of the fonts listed, feel free to share a link to the artwork you did in the comments below!

 

Santa’s Sleigh by HypoTypo

 

Santas Sleigh Font for Commercial Use

 

Kingthings Christmas by Kingthings

 

Kingsthings Christmas Free for Commercial Use Font

 

Mountains of Christmas by Tart Workshop Fonts

 

Mountains of Christmas Free Font for Commercial Use

 

ChopinScript font by Diogene

 

ChopinScript Free Font for Commercial Use

 

Snowpersons font —by Character

 

Snowpersons Free Font for Commercial Use

 

 

Adding Video to your Printed Marketing Materials for Free

 

In this post we will explore in detail how to beef up your printed marketing materials by adding your own custom video and making it easy for your customers to share the video as well.
I am sure some of you reading this right now are imagining small screens, wires and batteries or mini-DVDs glued to the inside of your media kits. Well, that’s not the case, it’s not that complicated and it’s free!

Adding the video to your printed marketing materials is done in 3 easy steps and all 3 tools needed are available freely on the Internet.

Video Distribution Step One

Video Distribution

The first step, assuming you already have a video that you would like to distribute to your customers, is to upload your video to the web. There are quite a few websites that will host your video file for free, some of the most popular being Youtube and Vimeo.

 If you are tech-savvy or have an IT person who handles your website, you can also upload your videos to your own website hosting server.

By uploading your videos to the web, you make them available and easily accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Most video hosting sites as you may already know, have a commenting feature where people can leave comments about your video and you can respond to their comments.

 

Link Creation Rope

Creating a Link

In this second step we will create a link to the video. Both Youtube and Vimeo automatically create a link for you and you simply copy and paste it. Most video hosting sites will do this for you as well.

After we have uploaded the video and generated a direct link to the video, we are going to make it a link that we can track to see how many times it has been used, shared and who shared it.

There are many free URL shorteners available that give you free tracking tools that provide basic Analytics with information regarding the use of the link you shortened. Here are a few of the most popular ones, I recommend you create a user account so that you can log in and view your results:

I tend to be partial to bit.ly because I like how easy it is to create a shortened url and the way they present the link tracking information.

To create a shortened URL, simply paste the video URL into the big blue text box and click shorten. Easy as that.

The Bit.ly analytic panel gives you different ways to look at what happened to your URL throughout its life:

  • A visual chart with the amount of daily clicks
  • Cool feature called Conversations which shows who is talking and sharing the same link on social networks plus a count of how many times it has been shared on various social networks.
  • QR code and a sidebar to share the link on your social networks right from the bit.ly page (go to settings to authorize this).

Being able to analyze the results of your efforts is a very valuable tool. If you can tell what did well and what went wrong with your marketing, you can use this information to improve your marketing and drive better results on your next campaign.

 

QR Code Connecting Print to Video

Code Connection

The final step in adding video to your printed marketing materials is to create the connection between your video and the paper your marketing material is printed on.

Most of you may be familiar with QR codes by now since they have been around for a while. You might see them quite often on catalogs, magazines, postcards and many other direct mail printed materials; not to mention packaging and even in commercial stores like BestBuy use them to show video product demos in the stores.

If you would like to learn more about QR codes, I highly recommend you read my post that contains information about QR codes and a list of Free QR Code readers and generators.

For this specific tutorial we will be using a QR code to direct the user’s mobile smart phone to a video that you uploaded per the instructions in step one. Why use a QR code? Well, how many people do you think would want to type a URL that looks like this – bit.ly/egm7XG – into their smart phone browser? By using a QR code all the user has to do is tap his QR code reader app and scan the code.

Let’s get to it! Creating a QR code is simple. Go to one of the free websites I listed in the blog post about QR Codes. Try them all to see which one you find easier to use and feel free to share with us in the comments below.

For this example I will use the www.BeQRious.com website to generate my QR code:

BeQRious.com screenshot

Simply paste the shortened URL you created in step 2 into the text box labeled “Enter web URL:” and click the Create Code button.

You will see on the right an image of a cellphone with a QR code on the screen. That is the code that was generated by your special and unique URL.

Now, if you are feeling a bit antsy, go ahead and fire up your QR Code reader app on your smart phone and scan the the code right on your computer screen. Make sure it works correctly and directs your smart phone to the video you uploaded in step 1.

If it doesn’t work, go back to step 1 and make sure you used the correct link for the video, in the URL shortener and that you used the correct link generated by the URL shortner, on BeQRious.com (or whatever qr code generator you decided to use).

Wa-la! That’s it. Download the QR code and insert into the design of your marketing materials.

I recommend you download the vector/PDF version of the code (if available) as it is created in vector format and can be enlarged or reduced to just about any size without losing any quality. I personally try to keep it no smaller than 1 inch x 1 inch.

IMPORTANT!!!

Rule #1 : TEST, TEST, TEST.
You must make sure that the code is not too small or too blurry to be read by the cameras on smart phones. You must test the QR code among different phone models and different QR code reader apps to make sure it works appropriately.

Mastering QR Codes: The Top Free QR Code Generators for Your Needs

*** Updated for 2023 ***

QR Code
Scan me!

QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) are the connection between online and offline marketing. With the advancement and acceleration of smart phones, consumers have the ability to scan and interpret this barcode with their mobile phone. Originally created by a subsidiary of Toyota, Denso-Wave, the QR Code technology has been around for over a decade.

Versatility is QR Code’s middle name.

The amount of data that a QR Code can hold is approximately 7089 Numeric characters or 4296 Alphanumeric characters as stated on Wikipedia.

This allows for the encoding of URLs, phone numbers, full contact information, SMS messages, links to launch YouTube videos, display static text… to name a few options offered by this revolutionary technology.

How Can Advertisers Use QR CODES in Printed Materials?

QR Codes in Advertising

Believe it or not, your entire marketing piece can be designed around a QR code.

Want to inform your customers of a GRAND OPENING? Create a Google My Business listing, generate a QR Code that contains a link to your business profile. Your customers can scan the code and visit your Google My Business profile on their mobile phone. Once there, your customer will find all there is to know about your business and directions to your location.

Need more customer reviews for your business? Here are the steps on how to create a Google QR Code for customer reviews:

    1. Begin by visiting the Google Place Finder Tool and entering your business name in the search box. Access the Google Place Finder Tool.
    2. Next, copy the “Place ID” associated with your business from the map’s tooltip.
    3. Modify the Reviews URL using the following format and paste your “Place ID” where indicated: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=PUT_ID_HERE
    4. Choose a QR code generator that suits your preference from the list below in the post.
    5. Paste your modified Reviews URL into your chosen QR code generator website, and then proceed to download your customized QR code.
    6. Finally, print and utilize your QR code to start collecting valuable reviews from your customers!

Do you have a  product demonstration video? Include a QR Code in your postcard, brochure or even next to the product in your catalog that will direct the customer to view a product demonstration video on their mobile device. This also gives you the chance to direct the customer to a landing page on your website before or after the video is viewed, reinforcing the sale.

Want to make it easier for that potential customer to retain your contact information? Generate a QR Code that contains all of your contact information and include it on your business card. When a customer scans your QR Code with their mobile device, your contact information will be displayed and saved to the “contacts” of the mobile device.

Business card with QR CodeDepending on your product or service, QR Codes can serve a variety of customizable uses in your marketing scheme.

Where can Custom QR Codes be Generated?

We must be thankful (to Denso-Wave) for the use of QR Codes being free of any license. This has given developers the ability to create online QR Code generators…FREE TO USE! Of course you will find some out there that charge to use their generator’s additional features or only allow for Non-Commercial use, but here is a list I compiled to help you get started generating QR Codes and better yet… more sales conversions!

  • QR Code Generator – Extensive Options – Powered by bit.ly so you can track scans (generator is free, click tracking requires paid plan)
  • ZXing Project – Simple To Use Options – Featured: Generate Wi-fi Network Login  QR Code
  • QRStuff – Extensive Options – Featured: Google Maps Directions, Multiple Design Features
  • Delivr – Extensive Options – Featured: Dynamic QR Codes
  • Website Planet – Extensive Options – Featured: Multiple Design Options
  • QR Code Monkey – Extensive Options – Featured: Bitcoin Address QR Code

How have you used QR Codes in your marketing?

Offset and Digital Business Cards – Tips for an Effective Design

Business Card Printing and Design with LogoBusiness cards are more than just portable contact information; Designed properly, they can convey character and utility. When designing your business cards, it is important to consider the end-user.

  • Who will be looking at them? (Design)
  • Who will use them? (Information)
  • How will they store them? (Finish)
  • Will it go into a wallet or be digitally scanned? (Paper Stock)

All of these questions are utterly important to avoid your card being the one that gets disposed of because the information in it did not justify the bulk in the wallet, or because the lack of specificity did not remind customers of what the company does, or even because it is so overly simplistic that it gets lost among other ones. Keep all this in mind and find the right balance for a successful, informative, eye-catching business card worthy of retention.

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Business Card Design - Simple

The same applies when choosing your printing format

You want to be different, but not so different that confuses your clientele. Again, think whether you are catering to traditional customers who will expect a more traditional font and paper stock, or adventurous individuals who will appreciate your company having taken risks on the size, cut, material, and finishing. People want to identify… help them identify with your company. Going even further, you should consider using double sided cards. You want your business cards to be recognized from every angle, and you want to take advantage of the space. Sometimes it is smart to even include information that can help the customer in their daily lives. A calendar, a time/currency/metric system converter, a tiny bus/subway map —these can be great ideas, as long as you can make a connection with your company and why this tool was included. Do not just put it in because it is cool and useful; your customers will want it to make sense.

Paper stock makes all the difference

Business Cards Paper Stock OptionsA great design can become a horrible one when the substrate it is printed on does not reflect the same quality.
Thickness (paper weight), gloss coated, un-coated, matte finish; Linen, Laid, natural white, solar white, textured or smooth? The paper stock can be considered part of the design process and choosing one is not as difficult as it may sound.


A few things to consider when choosing a paper stock for your business cards:

  • Is my design contemporary or modern?
  • a gloss paper gives colorful designs a more vibrant look
  • textured stocks such as linen or laid convey elegance and are considered premium papers
  • Paper colors and tones can have an effect on the colors in your design

Besides the aforementioned, paper mills produce an incredible line of paper types that can take your design above and beyond and increase the retention rate way past expectations.

The Finishing Touches

Some of you may be risk takers or outside-the-box thinkers; You like being different and you want your business card to express these features as well.
As we have seen above: options, options, options is all we have. Remember to choose the right combination of structure, colors, paper and last but not least, finishes. The wrong or unnecessary finish can ruin the beauty of a well designed and thought-out business card.


Here are a few of the most common finishes for your business cards:

Custom Die Cut

Standard shapes and completely custom cuts

Custom Die Cut Round Business Card

Rounded Edges

Accent one, two, three or all four edges

Business Cards Round Corners Edges

Spot UV

UV coating in custom shapes

Business Card with Spot UV Coating

Free Resources:

What combinations have you used to make your business cards stand out?

Post your comments below…