Preparing design for Spot UV Cards

Business cards with spot uv effect add not only the beauty and striking focus to the important elements in your cards but also are trending items as far as stationery and marketing items are considered. Earlier adopted method of bold, strikethrough and underlining of text to make the portion more likely to be readable and in focus is something of the past, now you can easily acheive that through highlighting the important portion of the design with spot uv like logo, name, designation or any specific tag line or acheivement associated with your brand. By doing so you also make your card more elegant.

What are Spot UV Cards:

Spot uv is a film applied to certain portion or whole of the card design. If you wish to have full uv then everything is highlighted so there is nothing more or less relevant and some where it defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. UV effect is applied to the card after applying matt lamination to the card size where uv needs to be done.

How design file should look like:

Although your design file size i.e. visiting card size will remain the same i.e. 90x54 mm but for spot uv, you would require a seperate file highlighting the portion where spot uv is required by black color, shown below in the image.

As you can clearly see that uv effect required in the design is highlighted with the black design adjacent to the main design. Here one thing to notice is that the spot uv design in black color is within a rectangle of same size as card size without any other element design, only portion where uv is required.

Where Spot UV Can't be applied:

There are certain portion where spot uv can't be applied, general thumb rule is portion in the design which you can't highlight with black color as shown above. You might be wondering how to apply spot uv to an image in the design. It's fairly simple to do that just make a rectangle of same size as image and fill it with black color.

Saving the design file:

UV effect cards can not be made in word or power point, for making design you require professional graphic designing softwares like corel draw, photoshop, illustrator, in design etc. You can make design in size 90x54 mm within an A4 size page as shown above in the image.

Checking print preview:

To check if the design is meeting the printing requirements, you can easily convert the design into pdf and zoom to see if it is pixelating or not and if everything is ok, you can upload and place the order for spot uv cards.