McIntosh Embossing was honored to have the opportunity to work with ARTCRANK in 2015, adding the foil magic to Sam Soulek’s gear grinding poster that headlined the poster show, and spending a Saturday afternoon at Fulton Brewery watching the Minnesota creative community celebrate creativity, biking and great beer!
Sam highlighted the poster’s white screenprint with golden spokes and gears. Our personal favorite was the propeller and the golden chain, which hinted at flight.
The poster was printed on several colors of paper.
A progressive Minneapolis real estate company, Greco Properties, understands marketing. They have developed apartment buildings in some of Minneapolis’ best neighborhoods, attracting many of the area’s discriminating young professionals. Among other unique traits, they give their properties distinctive names. This property is called “Lime.” Who doesn’t love limes–fresh, tropical, fun colored, used most commonly for parties?
They hired Carbon Creative, a Mineapolis design firm, to create an information packet for them that was as stunning and colorful as the new apartments. Here is the result:
(click on photo for a better view)
The piece opens up like a small package, within which the curious apartment seeker finds specific information sheets relating to their potential new home. Carbon Creative specified a metallic paper, and then decorated the cover with a simple and elegant two color foil stamp.
Even more special, Carbon Creative had us create a die that embosses and debosses the foil, so the wonderful letterforms appears to roll off the cover.
We partnered with Shapco Printing to make these beautiful little packets. Potential tenants get a sense of the whimsy they can expect when they rent an apartment from Greco just by seeing their marketing piece. That’s good design, and good business.
In Minnesota, we never take summer for granted. We can foil stamp giant sized posters or point of purchase displays on oversized substrates, up to 36″ by 49“. Gold that size will always get a client’s attention.
Most of our foil stamping is decorative, but we do some utilitarian foil stamping as well.
Scratch off foiling is the first example, perfect for scratch off award cards, hiding access codes, or creating a marketing message with an interactive feature.
We also stamp foil for security purposes. Several years ago we foil stamped these back stage passes for a Nickelback tour. You can’t produce these on your laser printer.
We also add holographic CIC images to coupons, like these. Coupons with that holographic foil image is almost impossible to forge, and it is easy for the cashier to validate.
We are fortunate to contribute to many projects that utilize beauty as an integral part of design, beauty meant to attract, to entice, to inspire.
We recently worked on a brand book for one of Minneapolis’ finest branding and marketing companies, Knock, Inc. While the great majority of the book was printed, they sprinkled small areas of foil stamping on the cover, and then they splashed their name in gold foil across the center spread. The foil image covers a 8 x 19 area.
When savvy marketers use our specialty so prominently, we think it speaks to the power of our techniques. We were overjoyed that Knock, Inc chose to illuminate their name. Shine on!
The lovely Saint Paul Hotel, one of the grande dame properties of the Twin Cities, has hosted many fine events over the past century, and they were seeking presentation materials that could effectively communicate the distinctive style and sophistication of their landmark property.
To that end, we worked directly with Laurie, the talented in-house designer at the hotel, to concept and produce an elegant presentation folder and notecard. Laurie used architectural elements found at the hotel, and interpreted them graphically to create wonderful textures that make an immediate visual and tactile impact. The photos capture some of the detail.
After six years, and over 700 makereadies and press runs, our foil and embossing work on The Saint John’s Bible, Heritage Edition, has been completed.
This monumental project allowed us to work on one of the great printed documents of the modern world, and the limited edition sets are now being purchased and placed around the world in various collections. Thus far, the Heritage Edition has been purchased for the Morgan Museum and Library in New York, the Yale Library in New Haven, CT, the Vatican Library in Rome, and many other museums, college libraries and various collections. Our illumination work can be seen in this video review of just one of the seven volumes. Donald Jackson, the art director and principal artist behind the Saint John’s Bible, inspired us to take foil stamping to heights we would have never imagined otherwise.
The printing of the book was completed by our print partner, The John Roberts Company, and our foil work decorates approximately half of the 1184 pages that comprise the seven volumes.
One note. We did not foil stamp the book’s cover. That was completed by Roswell Binding of AZ, who did all the binding work for the edition. We did all the foil stamping on the text pages.
Images from The Saint John’s Bible Heritage Edition
Gospel and Acts Volume, Copyright 2012
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Catholic Edition, Copyright 1989, 1993 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved
The invites is literally layered with gold, instantly conveying the importance and prestige associated with this invite.
Harry Winston, the worldwide jewelry brand known for diamonds, glamour and global prestige, is holding a conference at The Pensinula Hotel in Shanghai, and they needed an unforgettable invitation. McIntosh Embossing teamed with Print4Change, a dynamic local print company and Harry Winston’s creative team to create an invite that looked like hammered gold plate. The technique we employed was created here at McIntosh, and the “texture of gold” that results is uniquely appealing. Some of the invites were stamped in English, and others in Chinese (Mandarin?). I wish I received one of the invites!
Thanks for Harry Winston, and thanks to our friends at Print4Change.
We have recently worked on several jobs where we foil stamped special security foil on manufacturer’s coupons. Coupon fraud is a serious and growing problem, especially given the proliferation of sophisticated copy and printing equipment, so the addition of the special CIC (Coupon Information Council) holographic foil on a coupon leaves no doubt as to its veracity. The pictures don’t do the foil justice, but it jumps off the printed document, and makes copying impossible. You can see the silver horizontal ribbon of foil, featuring a repeated CIC round logo, on the coupon pictured above
Foil stamping and embossing add a level of security to any document, since aspiring counterfeiters can’t easily recreate foil’s brilliance. That is why it is used to decorate currencies, passports, and other critical documents throughout the world. It doesn’t hurt that the foil and embossing also makes the document sharper looking.
Embossing and foil stamping for graphic artists 