Running hot and cold: Print 21 magazine article

The application of shiny metal foil to printed matter has always been seen as a symbol of luxury and quality. But now the age-old process of hot foiling faces new competition with the arrival of inline cold foiling on a sheetfed press in Melbourne. Peter Haydock tests the temperature in the market for print embellishment.

What is it about foil finishing that’s so attractive to humans? Like magpies we’re suckers for gold and silver foils that flash in the light and suggest elegance, class and superiority. It’s the bling bling of the printing world.

The monks twigged to it in the early days of Christianity, decorating their manuscripts with gold and silver as they toiled in their abbeys. The earliest surviving illuminated manuscripts, heralding from Ireland, Constantinople and Italy, date as far back as 400AD. Gold and silver were also used extensively in paintings throughout the ages, particularly in religious art, crossing interfaith boundaries. Think of cathedral ceilings and Russian icons.

Fast forward to the 20th century and use of gold and silver foiling came into its own with the dawn of modern advertising and packaging. These days, what quality product would be seen dead without a touch of gold and silver foil? Hot foil stamping became a production process that was also part art, with intricate dies that suggest the pinnacle of quality and excellence, even if the products they’re spruiking sometimes fall disappointingly short.

While there are liquors and perfumes that probably owe their success to their hot foil packaging, it also has to be said that it’s a time-consuming process by modern printing standards and is relatively expensive. It requires specialised die cutting and embossing equipment, is labour intensive and, while always important peripherally in the printing industry as an offline process, it’s never been a part of the commercial printing production line. With the advent of commercial cold foiling inline, however, the picture has changed.

It’s cold out there
Major press manufacturers like Heidelberg, manroland, Komori, Mitsubishi and Ryobi are now offering cold foil systems that can be attached to their conventional sheetfed presses. These operate differently to narrow web machines which have been used mainly in the flexo area for some years, with a single print station applying UV adhesive that’s cured before the foil is stripped.

These new commercial sheetfed press modules customarily use two print stations – one for adhesive and one for foil - producing exceptional finishes for labels, packaging and high quality commercial printing jobs in virtually unlimited runs. The cold foil is applied inline on a wide range of substrates and the quality of the finishing is exceptional. The first of these units, a Heidelberg FoilStar, has just been installed at PrintLinx in Port Melbourne in Victoria. Given that it’s a relatively inexpensive add-on (well… relatively inexpensive to purchasers of multi-million dollar presses anyway) it seems likely it won’t be the last.

So is cold foiling set to replace hot foil? In the short term at least it seems highly unlikely and, anyway, who’s to say that it’s designed as a replacement? Hot foil stamping still has distinct advantages over cold foiling. The very process itself, in which heat and pressure apply the foil to the substrate, imparts its own distinct tactile characteristic. Our fingers can feel the impression it leaves, adding another sensory perception to the actual look of the stamping. In the luxury goods category cold foil will be hard pressed to displace this ability. Where embossing is applied as well as hot foil this quality is enhanced in spades, providing powerful physical characteristics.

Avon Graphics’ Trevor Hone says cold foil is really a separate process to hot foiling: “They work on a complementary basis, rather than competitive. Cold foil is ideal for certain large print runs, where the surface area requiring foil is high, whereas hot foil suits a wider variety of jobs that use different foil image sizes and is suitable for all run lengths. The waste on cold foil can be quite substantial, which makes it an expensive process.

“I think they will bring foiling to large print runs where it might not have existed before and the two processes will continue side by side addressing different markets.”

He’s a FoilStar man
As time goes on, however, the alliance may become an uneasy one. Frank Todisco, managing director of PrintLinx in Melbourne, has the confident look of a man who has made a good decision and knows it. Talk to him about his newly-installed Heidelberg XL105 six colour press with two coating towers and two drying towers and he grins broadly. He’s the first printer in Australia to install one of these that’s also equipped with Heidelberg’s FoilStar cold foil technology, and he’s anticipating big things from it.

“Cold foil is the next big thing in printing and PrintLinx is in on the ground floor,” Todisco says. “It takes special effects finishing to a new level, as part of the inline process, with all the cost and labour savings that come with it.”

The samples he shows of FoilStar’s output are certainly impressive. He points to an illustration of a car in a street which is printed in normal four colour process, but the car image itself has been overprinted on a foil base and looks, well, like a real car. True, it could have been printed on metalised board, but then the whole image including the street would share the metal effect, losing the point.

“The beauty of cold foil is that you can use it on its own with silver showing through, you can overprint it, you can print holograms on it; you’re restricted only by your imagination. To understand what it does you have to regard it as a fifth colour, with all the versatility this implies. Designers are going to love it and our sales staff are calling on every major design house in Australia to showcase the output.”

While there’s no doubt cold foiling can be impressive, in design terms it takes some getting used to and requires considerable colour visualisation ability to imagine a fifth colour as an extension of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black spaces. In simple form, the designer creates the design working from a palette of colour samples, like a normal PMS swatch, but which indicate what the colour will look like overprinted on foil. A foil channel is then created in the design software along with the CMYK channels, just as a designer would create a separate channel for a UV overprint for instance. The effects will no doubt encourage designers to replace subtlety with surfeit and the tendency to go overboard will be tempting for some. For best effects though, nuance is the watch word.

The process offers many benefits for printers looking for a high quality finish. Press throughput is fast, the foil can be overprinted with text, illustration and halftones, there’s no substrate distortion, you don’t need expensive dies or heat transfer, make-ready is reasonably fast and registration isn’t a problem.

Switching to cold
In the systems currently available, cold foil modules for print production are made up of two units: one applies an adhesive to the paper, defining the imprint for the foil, while the second unit releases the foil from a carrier sheet and applies it to the substrate. This is how the process avoids using dies. The second unit, which actually feeds the foil, has take-up and take-off units for applying it. Along with the paper sheet, it’s fed into the nip between the blanket and impression cylinders and applied by pressure to the areas coated in glue. The backing is then rewound with any surplus foil. Colours are added inline to the foiled substrate in the same pass. When the stations are not being used for foiling, they can be used as standard colour stations.

On the question of whether cold foil is a replacement for hot foil, Frank Todisco believes it is.

“Many of the customers who currently use hot foil will make the switch when they see the quality and consider the cost and the speed,” he says. “Cold foil is just so much more pliable. There will still be a place perhaps for hot foil. For instance, cold foil doesn’t give you that pressed on look, which some designers like for its tactile benefits. However, you can’t print on hot foil and you can’t laminate it in any form. And you certainly can’t get the majority of the effects that cold foil gives you. I think it’s more effective, much faster and cheaper. There’s a big challenge here for hot foil.”

While acknowledging that challenge, PrintLinx says its preference is to work with other finishing companies rather than against them.

“We do a lot of trade printing and our intention here is to offer our services to other finishing companies at a sell-on price to their customers,” Todisco says. “Frankly we just want to run the presses. If we do 100 percent trade press work I’m happy. Our preference is not to start chasing other people’s customers. Additionally there will be some large run customers who haven’t traditionally used hot foiling, such as beer labels. We can offer these customers a new way of adding quality to their labels without adding to the time it takes to print them.”

Hot foil still hot
One person who is excited with the introduction of cold foiling to Australia is David Murphy of Leonhard Kurz in Australia. Kurz is one of the major international providers of foiling technology, equipment and consumables, and has been selling gold leaf to the finishing industry since the 1890s.

Says Murphy: “Kurz believes both applications have a place in the market here and around the world. Hot foil has dominated the decoration of high end products and there are numerous printers and equipment able to provide the application. It’s readily available to all printers as a finishing process. Cold foiling offers increased control over the work, and allows the finished product to come off the press, without loss of press speed. So there are advantages for both.

“We don’t see cold foil as a replacement for hot foil but an additional opportunity to decorate additional products. It should lead to new markets and to products not previously considered suitable for foil.

“There are about 60 cold foil units now installed around the world and, as a manufacturer with a keen interest in both processes, we haven’t seen any significant falling off of hot foil business.”

Murphy says there are no environmental issues associated with either process, a view shared by Avon Graphics’ Trevor Hone.

“The finishing industry has no serious environmental problems,” he says. “Virtually all papers that are used in finishing, such as foiling, can be recycled through the de-inking process and, as far as I’m aware, there are no shop floor issues with finishing products either, such as the solvent ink problems that have plagued some wide format printers.”

What about the question of wastage? After all, the cold foil is applied in rolls 1050mm wide in 18,000 metre rolls. If you only want to print a small logo in foil, what happens to the rest?

Says Frank Todisco: “That was the question we asked when we were investigating this. We looked for a year at the processes before seeing FoilStar at drupa and Heidelberg’s solution to this. The FoilStar system provides slitters, which enable you to cut your roll and use just a portion, to cover the area you want to foil. If you have two or more areas, the slitters can cut the rolls to cover these areas too, with up to six different reel sizes. The foil that remains on the rolls can be used later for another job. These days that’s important with the focus on sustainability.”

The next year or so will indicate the potential in Australia for cold foiling but, for the moment, Frank Todisco and PrintLinx are convinced it’s bright – not to say glittering.