How do you handle frosted is the workhorse?

Clear plastic shows everything behind it, including whatever is on the table. Type floats and legibility collapses. Frosted for anything text-heavy. It diffuses the background into an even field, so white ink and foil both read. Clear is reserved for pieces where seeing through is the idea.

How do you handle white ink first, always?

Spot colour printed straight onto clear PVC goes translucent and shifts against whatever it sits on. An opaque white underprint under every colour pass. On the two-pantone bookmarks that is three passes for two colours, and it is the only way the colour stays put.

How do you handle plastic where paper would fail?

If paper does the job, plastic is just an expensive substitute. Chose applications where the material earns it: waterproof tags, coasters that meet a wet glass, festival passes on a lanyard, a magnet save-the-date, loyalty cards that get punched. The duplex two-tone edge is the one purely aesthetic piece in the set.

Design exercise · Business cards · Peppermint

Plastic, past the gift card

An exercise pushing plastic across the range: wedding invitations, save-the-dates, hang tags, bookmarks, place cards, coasters, festival passes, loyalty and gift cards, in frosted, clear, mirror, holographic and tinted stock.

Business-cards for Print Peppermint design exercise with white ink, spot colour, , raised spot uv foil stamping, frosted, crystal clear, mirror, holographic, smoke and colour-tinted pvc, frosted acrylic and die cut, punched, duplexed two-tone edge.

FoilsSilver · 120, Yellow Gold · 101, Rose Gold · 117-3, Deep Copper · 115-2 TechniquesDie Cut, Duplex, Hot Foil, Copper Foil, Gold Foil, Rose Gold Foil, Silver Foil, Raised Spot UV StocksWhite PVC card stock, Frosted plastic

The idea

Plastic in this trade usually means a gift card or a membership card, printed CMYK, and that is the whole conversation.

Three rules

01Frosted is the workhorse. Frosted for anything text-heavy. It diffuses the background into an even field, so white ink and foil both read. Clear is reserved for piec…
02White ink first, always. An opaque white underprint under every colour pass. On the two-pantone bookmarks that is three passes for two colours, and it is the only w…
03Plastic where paper would fail. Chose applications where the material earns it: waterproof tags, coasters that meet a wet glass, festival passes on a lanyard, a magnet sav…

The brief we set ourselves

So the exercise was to take it everywhere else: invitations, tags, bookmarks, coasters, place cards, passes. Thirty-one pieces, and a rule that the material had to be the right answer rather than a novelty.