Tips for making electronic dielines and varnish plates

March 12, 2009 by Brenda Bell · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Bindery, Design, Educational, Finishing, Prepress 

Here are some tips for creating die lines for your projects that require special finishing processes such as foil stamping, embossing and die cutting.

  • Always create dies as vector art. This is due to the fact that the machines that read the die lines and in turn cut and bend the metal to make your die, can only read vector information. The most popular ways to make a vector die line are by using your page layout program (such as quark or indesign) or using your vector art program (such as illustrator).
  • The only exception the rule above is when making a sculpted emboss die. Sculpted emboss dies can include raster (pixel based) information, however they are quite expensive to make.
  • If you would like to show your die line over your art instead of a separate file, spec it as a spot color in your layout or vector art application and put it on a separate layer. This will allow you to toggle the die line’s visibility on and off .
  • On foil and emboss dies, make the areas that you want embossed or foiled 100% of a solid pms color. The areas without the color will in the case of embossing, stay flat and in the case of foiling, not foil. This can also be applied to specifying which areas on a printed piece get spot varnish or spot uv applied.

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