Good quality business cards, smooth process, recom... Good quality business cards, smooth process, recommended
Custom Metallic Foil Stickers in Custom Shapes and Sizes
Combine full-colour artwork with metallic foil to create stickers where selected details brighten and reflect as they catch the light. Apply foil to logos, lettering, illustrations, borders or larger areas of your design, creating contrast between the reflective foil and the surrounding printed artwork.
Metallic Foil Stickers for Merchandise, Giveaways and Packaging
Offer metallic foil stickers as products in their own right, include them with customer orders as a thoughtful extra, or use them across packaging as labels and seals. They also give customers a way to display your artwork, branding or motifs on laptops, notebooks, cases and other possessions. Choose your specification online, then after checkout reply to your Order Confirmation email with your artwork or design brief. We’ll send you a digital proof for you to approve before we begin production.
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Create stickers in custom shapes and sizes, with 12 metallic foil finishes to suit your artwork.
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Order from just 50 stickers to thousands, or start with 5 copies of your own design to test first.
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Get support from our in-house design team, from choosing your options and checking your files to creating sticker artwork from your brief.
Will My Metallic Foil Stickers Look the Same as They Do on Screen?
Metallic foil cannot look exactly the same on screen as it does in real life. A photo, video or digital mock-up can only show a limited representation of the foil’s general colour and behaviour because a screen cannot reproduce the full reflective effect of the physical material.
What you see is affected by the camera used to capture it, the lighting at the time, image or video compression, and the brightness, contrast, colour settings and panel type of the device you are viewing it on.
Screens also have a limited dynamic range, meaning there is a limit to how dark and how bright they can display at the same time. Metallic foil can move from much darker tones into extremely bright reflections as it catches the light, with those reflections changing continuously as the lighting, viewing angle and position of the sticker change.
Single-colour foils stay within the same colour family while changing in brightness and depth, whereas holographic foil can also shift through different rainbow colours as the angle changes.
Use the footage on this page to compare the general behaviour of each finish, but if the exact colour, brightness and reflection are important, a physical sample will give you a much more accurate impression of the finished foil.
How Much of My Sticker Design Can I Foil?
There is no set percentage of your sticker design that has to be foiled. Metallic foil can be used for small details such as lettering, logos, borders and linework, or across larger areas of the artwork.
Combining foil with CMYK print creates contrast between the reflective and non-reflective parts of the design, so consider which areas you want to catch the light rather than working towards a particular amount of foil coverage.
How Fine Can the Foil Details Be on My Stickers?
Keep metallic foil details at least 0.5pt (0.18mm) thick so they can be reproduced reliably.
Very fine lines and intricate details can become harder to reproduce cleanly, particularly where foil needs to sit closely alongside printed artwork. Allow for normal production movement rather than designing around perfect print-to-foil alignment.
Our guide to digital print movement tolerances explains this in more detail.
Do Metallic Foil Stickers Need Lamination?
Yes. The printed face of our metallic foil stickers must have soft touch lamination before the foil is applied.
The laminate covers and protects the print while creating the surface needed for the foiling process. Toner is then printed over the laminate in the areas marked for foil, and the metallic foil bonds to this toner using heat and pressure. The printed artwork remains protected beneath the laminate, while the metallic foil sits on the finished surface.
Lamination adds protection during normal handling, but it does not automatically make the finished sticker waterproof or weatherproof. Our guide to lamination explains the role of the laminate in more detail.
How Durable Are Metallic Foil Stickers?
The durability of a foil sticker depends on where it is applied, the surface material and the conditions it is exposed to.
Soft touch lamination protects the printed face, while the metallic foil on the finished surface can mark if it is scratched or scuffed. Moisture, heat, refrigeration, curved surfaces and the condition of the surface the sticker is applied to can also affect how it performs.
For added reassurance, you can order 5 test copies and try them on the actual product, packaging or surface to see how they hold up in the conditions they’ll experience before placing a larger order.
How Do I Prepare Artwork for Metallic Foil Stickers?
Supply your main printed artwork in CMYK at the finished sticker size, with 2mm bleed, a 3mm safe zone and raster images at a minimum of 300 DPI. We accept PDF, JPG and fully packaged Adobe Illustrator files.
Place everything that needs metallic foil on a separate layer or page as solid 100% K black artwork. If you are ordering a custom shape, supply the cut line separately as a solid 1pt magenta line.
We also highly recommend including a reference image showing the print, foil and cut shape together so our team can clearly see how the finished sticker should look. See our foil artwork setup guide for illustrated examples.
What Should I Check on My Metallic Foil Sticker Proof?
Check the printed artwork, foil position and cut shape carefully before approving your digital proof.
Confirm the spelling, dimensions, layout and orientation, and make sure every element intended for foil is shown in the correct place. Pay particular attention to fine details, borders and areas where foil sits close to printed artwork or the cut edge.
Our team checks your files for technical issues before production, but the proof is your opportunity to confirm that the wording, information and layout are correct. Your digital proof will show where the foil will appear, but it will not simulate the metallic reflection or changing appearance of the finished foil.
Our guide explains how to check your foil printing proof before approval.
Metallic foil cannot look exactly the same on screen as it does in real life. A photo, video or digital mock-up can only show a limited representation of the foil’s general colour and behaviour because a screen cannot reproduce the full reflective effect of the physical material.
What you see is affected by the camera used to capture it, the lighting at the time, image or video compression, and the brightness, contrast, colour settings and panel type of the device you are viewing it on.
Screens also have a limited dynamic range, meaning there is a limit to how dark and how bright they can display at the same time. Metallic foil can move from much darker tones into extremely bright reflections as it catches the light, with those reflections changing continuously as the lighting, viewing angle and position of the sticker change.
Single-colour foils stay within the same colour family while changing in brightness and depth, whereas holographic foil can also shift through different rainbow colours as the angle changes.
Use the footage on this page to compare the general behaviour of each finish, but if the exact colour, brightness and reflection are important, a physical sample will give you a much more accurate impression of the finished foil.
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