How do you handle tone on tone, on purpose?

A foil that close to the stock has almost no colour contrast. Light it flat and the mark vanishes; light it hard and a glossy foil would have flared and looked cheap. Matte blush foil, a half-shade warmer and deeper than the board. It reads as a change in surface rather than a change in colour, so the asterisk appears as the box turns and settles back when it stops. The box is the restraint argument we make to customers, made in our own material.

How do you handle matte foil, not gloss?

Gloss blush foil on blush board gives you one hot specular and nothing else: a bright blob where a mark should be. Chenhui 133-5. It holds a dry sheen across the whole asterisk, so all six arms read at once instead of one catching the light.

How do you handle dyed-through board?

A coated or lined board shows a white or grey core at every cut and score. On a box with this many flaps, that is a lot of white hairlines. 480gsm blush-nude uncoated, dyed through. Every die-cut edge, tuck slot and score is the same blush, so the die line disappears into the object.

How do you handle no ink at all?

Adding a printed wordmark or a spec panel would have meant an ink pass, drying time, and a second thing competing with the foil. Left it off. One die, one foil, one board. The whole package is a demonstration that a single well-chosen finish is enough.

Case study · Boxes · Print Peppermint

A blush foil on blush board, and nothing else

Our own samples box: a tuck-top folding carton on 480gsm blush-nude uncoated board, carrying the Peppermint asterisk in Chenhui 133-5 matte blush foil. No ink, no second colour, no laminate.

Boxes for Print Peppermint with matte blush foil stamping, tuck-top folding carton, custom die, 480gsm blush-nude uncoated, dyed through, no ink, no coating and run of 500.

TechniquesDie Cut, Hot Foil, Matte Blush Foil, Pigment Foil, Folded StocksBlush-nude uncoated 480gsm board

The idea

Every sample we send lands in a box, and for years that box was a stock mailer with a sticker on it. That is a strange thing for a specialty printer to do: the first object a customer touches said nothing about what we make.

Four rules

01Tone on tone, on purpose. Matte blush foil, a half-shade warmer and deeper than the board. It reads as a change in surface rather than a change in colour, so the ast…
02Matte foil, not gloss. Chenhui 133-5. It holds a dry sheen across the whole asterisk, so all six arms read at once instead of one catching the light.
03Dyed-through board. 480gsm blush-nude uncoated, dyed through. Every die-cut edge, tuck slot and score is the same blush, so the die line disappears into the ob…
04No ink at all. Left it off. One die, one foil, one board. The whole package is a demonstration that a single well-chosen finish is enough.

Why we made it

So the samples box became its own small brief. Not a showcase of every process we sell, which would have made it a sampler rather than a box, but a single decision executed properly: one mark, one foil, one board, no ink.