Here at Print Peppermint, we consider ourselves lucky that we are exposed to so many creative plastic business card designs every single day. If you've decided to print on plastic for your next business card project, you've made a wise choice but there are some things you should know.
Here are a few recommendations that will help make sure your next plastic business card turns out amazing:
Our business card sample pack includes 20+ samples of our most
creative business cards. It also includes some helpful tools for designers like the CMYK Color Reference
Plastic Card (see #2).
2. Use dark colors in your design
In our business card sample pack you will find a
20 pt clear frosted plastic card with some optimized CMYK color values printed on it. This tool was designed to show you what the actual ink color will look like after printing because it is hard to get an accurate impression of color saturation on a semi-transparent medium when designing on a lighted screen.
3. Use lots of negative (blank) space
My favorite part about
clear plastic business cards is the simple beauty of the clear frosted plastic. I tend to like minimalist business card designs in general but especially on frosted plastic. What I mean by that is try to make sure you leave lots of blank space or white space in your design and don't fill the whole canvas with color.
For some great examples of simple minimalist
plastic business card designs check out our selection of free customizable plastic business card templates.
4. If you want it Solid... Use Foil
Although not available on our standard plastic card product, foil stamping is available on our
30 pt clear plastic business cards and our
30 pt white plastic business cards.
Whether you choose our 20 pt or 30 pt
clear plastic cards, any ink printed areas will have some measure of transparency. This means when the card is laying flat on a white piece of paper the colors really pop but when you hold it up in the air and light penetrates from behind, the image can become very faint.
For this reason, we recommend using a hot
foil stamp because the foil is a 100% solid opaque sheet that will provide a full contrast against the translucent plastic.
5. Registration isn't perfect :(
If you choose to enhance your
premium plastic business card with special finishes such as
foil stamping,
spot gloss uv, or white ink (blocker) you need to know from the start things are not going to line up perfectly.
For example (as shown right) if you wish to add a white backer to your plastic card and then print full bleed on top of the white area you may notice a white border, in other words, the ink may not go all the way to the edge of the white blocked area.
If you choose to add spot UV to your plastic card you need to know that the spot UV application can shift up to 1/16 " in any direction from card to card. It is for this reason that we recommend using spot UV on larger elements and not on
small text.
