Creating hot foil stamping

Creating hot foil stamping in Adobe Illustrator CC

1. Create a spot colour
2. Set the spot colour to overprint
3. Check colours with separation preview

1. Create a spot color

First, create a new colour swatch. To do this, in the window menu, select the Colour control panel to open the colour chart. Enter the values C40 M40 Y70 K0 in the CMYK colour list. Then, in the List function, select the option Create new colour swatch… and name the colour hotfoil.

Change the attributes from CMYK to spot colour. Click OK to display the spot colour swatch you’ve just created. You’ll find it by opening the Window menu, then Separation preview.

Don’t worry, this spot colour won’t be visible after printing, but will be covered by the hot foil. Define all vectorised elements you wish to cover with hotfoil with the new “hotfoil” swatch. To do this, please use the Attribute control panel in your toolbar to select the individual elements and colour them with your new “hotfoil” spot colour.

2. Set spot color to overprint

The elements you’ve defined as “hotfoil” spot colour must now be set to overprint. Select these elements using the direct selection tool (in the toolbar) and open the Attribute control panel under the Window menu, then check the Overprint background box.

For a contour line, select the Overprint stroke option. For areas select Overprint fill. The “overprint” option ensures that the areas below the elements to be overprinted are continuous and not omitted.

3. Check colours with the separations preview

To check that the settings have been made correctly, open the window menu and open the separations preview. To check the separations, check the Overprint preview box. You can use the eye icon to hide or show one or more separations.