Cold foil process is here to stay. What a great way to use silver foil… overprint CMYK and create any color foil!!! That is a graphic designers ultimate fantasy and guess what? We have it and know how to use it properly! Here's a few of our cold foil or full color foil process business card samples.

The full color foil process has a few different names flying around the web. Cat5ive Print refers to the process as Full Color Foil because you can have a full color image printed on foil! Cold Foil Process is the technique used by the press department so either one really works for us.

This sample photo of this full color foil business card show's how you can create a hologram like effect using the foil properly and photoshop properly. Katie… our head designer only used the Full Color Foil on the motorcycle rider and the product image. The background was slightly blurred to help POP the two foreground images. Call us anytime to discuss this graphic design technique or just to talk about anything creative.

Check out what we got for Christmas! Cat5ive Print pin up girl shirts, silk screened by our friends Chuck and Ian at Iron Forge Press. Printed on 100% organic cotton, American Apparel men and women's tees, the white areas are bleached out with a discharge ink, and the black is a black foil. Our matching black foil plastic cards should be arriving any day now.

Good morning all.. Here's Monday's eye candy. First we start with the 5 x7 Greeting Card printed full color with a score for easy folding. The greeting card also has a UV coating on the outside to give it some extra Holiday Cheer! The inside of the greeting card was left uncoated so we could on sign it.

Moving on to the thickest paper business card we print… 16pt Matte Finish with full bleed and full color. As you can see it's for another design group as that is who we do a lot of our printing for. Graphic Designers trust us with their projects because we can understand what they want…. awesomeness! This photo was directed to show you the nice matte finish and the thickness of the paper stock.

Wrapping up today's blog we wanted to show you a close-up of the Full Color Foil Process business card. What makes this process so cool is you can pick the areas you want to be foil just like you would pick the areas to have a Spot UV or Spot Varnish. All of our Full Color Foil business cards get printed on a nice and thick 14pt coated stock and then get UV coated to protect the cold foil process. CMYKF the F is for FOIL!

How do I set up a file for Full Color Foil Process?

First create a new spot channel in Photoshop: Choose Window > Channels to display the Channels palette. Choose New Spot Channel from the Channels palette menu – If you made a selection, that area will be filled with the currently specified spot color.

Please name the new spot channel “Silver Foil”. Click the color box and choose a color that is different from the rest of the colors in the artwork so that it is easy to distinguish where the foil will be.

If you already have an alpha channel and need to convert it to a spot channel, select the alpha channel in the Channels palette and choose Channel Options from the palette menu. Select Spot Color. If needed, rename the channel to “Silver Foil”. Click the color box, choose the right build color in the Color Picker dialog box, and click OK.

NOTE: You may need to invert the image, if so choose Image > Adjustments > Invert.

Save the file as a DCS2 eps – stands for Desktop Color Separations. This is a special kind of EPS file that can contain spot color channels. Please make sure that only the option “Spot Colors” is checked in the dialog box.

NOTE: If the “Spot Color” option is not available, then a spot channel was not created. Please check, and verify the steps.

The next window should be as follows:

• Preview: Macintosh (8 bits/pixel)
• DCS: Single File DCS, No Composite
• Encoding: Binary
• No options checked

Happy Friday all… Just a quick post here. This cold foil process business card is going to press today! The red tribal pattern in the skull will be red foil process on a semi gloss finish. Can't wait to post the photos of this one! Thanks Canada! Keep those orders coming in!

Happy Halloween from all of us at Cat5ive Print – The Printer For Creatives. It's been a great year and we look forward to serving the creative professionals during this last business quarter. It looks like business is starting to pick-up. We are actually seeing some start-up businesses stepping up to the plate and ordering start-up marketing collateral like full color brochures, foil business cards and printed flyers. This is a great sign we are past the toughest part of the recession. Now we just need unemployment to slow down and foreclosures…. Shouldn't that be our priority right now… not universal health care.

We decide to bust out some old school heavy metal artwork for our 2009 Halloween promo. Eddie was a big influence for myself as I grew up during the birth of heavy metal. This was very extreme in the early 80's but seems somewhat tame for the present.

Eddie, Iron Maiden's mascot, first appeared with the band after their stage manager at the time (Dave Beasly) designed a head that was placed above the drummer at concerts and periodically spat blood through it's mouth. The joke which went with the head was:

Eddie did not have a body until Iron Maiden met Derek Riggs, who designed a body to accompany the head. The band subsequently decided to keep this body secret until their first album 'Iron Maiden' was released. In 1980 the body was revealed, with the first incarnation of Eddie looking remarkably different from other Eddies since. It also only showed the top half of his torso.

Eddie caused much controversy for the band on the Sanctuary and Women In Uniform single covers. The Sanctuary cover depicted the Iron Maiden mascot having stabbed Margaret Thatcher to death. (Margaret Thatcher was the British Prime Minister at the time). This was censored out and widely believed to have been banned by Magaret Thatcher herself which is false. Rod Smallwood (the bands manager) had decided the black bar that was put on the cover to censor it was good publicity. The black bar is only present in the UK edition, the European releases do not have it.

On the Women In Uniform sleeve Margaret Thatcher is shown hiding behind a wall waiting to ambush Eddie with a sub-machine gun, Eddie is shown walking along hand in hand with a nurse and a schoolgirl which caused more controversy and ended with feminists branding Iron Maiden sexist.

The Number of the Beast sleeve showed Eddie controlling the devil whilst the devil is controlling a smaller puppet of Eddie. Many people believe this is where the misconception that Iron Maiden are a "satanist band" (something that the band have always fiercely denied)

For Iron Maiden's album Piece Of Mind Eddie was in a mental asylum and had been lobotomised (the reason for the bolt on his head). The bolt from this has remained with eddie throughout the years.

The Powerslave cover depicted Eddie as a huge shrine on a pyramid in ancient egypt. This cover had many hidden messages included on it such as "Bollokz" on the left hand side of the pyramid and "What a load of crap" on the right hand side. Above the entrance to the shrine is Derek Riggs logo

The Somewhere In Time logo is full of hidden messages (All of which were featured in our article, Somewhere In Time Cover Art Secrets) and shows Eddie as a futuristic being with a laser gun, looking much like a 'Terminator' (Terminator I was released in 1984, with Somewhere in Time released in 1986 so this was very much the imagery of the time). This graphic imagery can be directly contrasted against the Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son artwork, which shows just the top half of Eddie over a lake with his own entrails clutched in his hand.

The No Prayer for the Dying (1990) artwork showed Eddie in a rather old state cracking out of a grave and Fear of the Dark (1992) was produced by a different artist (Melvyn Grant). The X Factor differed from the normal style of Iron Maiden covers showing Eddie with his legs missing and on an Electric Chair. Many people thought this was a computer model when they first saw it but in reality it was a photograph of a minature model made by Hugh Syme

The Virtual XI cover was based on the Ed Hunter video game in which you play as Eddie blasting your way through many familiar parts of Iron Maiden's history. The reunion album Brave New World (2000) featured an Eddie face smiling down from the sky on a futuristic London. Some regard this as the best Iron Maiden cover artwork ever.Shortly afterward, after he produced artwork for the Wicker Man single release that was rejected, Derek Riggs announced that the Wicker Man single release art would be last piece that he would create for Iron Maiden, attributing this to the fact that "they are too difficult to work with"

On "Visions Of The Beast" (2003) Eddie gets his brain back in the final sequence as it flies around him. Even though he recieved his brain back, the artwork on the Give Me Ed Tour Eddie still retained the bolt on his forehead. (The Dance of Death artwork did not feature the bolt on Eddies forehead)

2003 saw Iron Maiden's new album "Dance Of Death" achieve great success although many questioned its peculiar choice of artwork. It featured Eddie looking much like the grim reaper on a geometrically patterned dance floor with hooded characters in the background. In the foreground 11 CGI people and 2 CGI animals appeared. There appear to be many mistakes in this artwork as has been pointed out many times (These can be read in the article Dance Of Death Cover Mistakes)

Eddie has evolved greatly over the 25+ years of Iron Maiden's career and he will undoubtedly evolve and change with the band, before their reign at the top of Metal music is over.

Okay, so here’s the deal. I was thinking about maybe getting a tattoo, but since its permanent, I wasn’t too sure. I’m not going to let someone put ink on my skin if I didn’t dig their style or work. I’m not a judgmental person but if the artist doesn’t get my style then I don’t trust them to do something that is going to be on my body forever.

I was talking to a couple of my friends that already had some and they were telling me about this guy that had done a couple of their pieces. I was still a little unsure so my friend handed me his business card and I was intrigued just from that alone.

The card was like made out of some shiny material that looked similar to colored foil that you would cook with. And it had this amazing zombie looking thing with gauged ears and torn flesh. It was just so unique and exactly what I was looking for.

I called the guy and was talking to him and was asking what his work usually consisted of, what he preferred to draw, his specialty and everything else like that. Some how we got to talking about his personal style and why he chose the style of cards he did, where he got them from and everything else. He told me that it was indeed made of foil and that the zombie was just funky and cool which made me think, “ if this guy represents himself with foiled zombie cards, he’s got to be like really different.”

I was so excited to go and meet with him and work on an idea for my tattoo. Meeting him and talking to him a little I could see that his card fit him perfectly. He was unique and strange but in an insane, killer way. His work was like nothing I had ever seen before. I’m so happy that I found him to do my tattoo, all because of a business card that was passed to me.

It just goes to show you what your business card says about you and how powerful they really are.