In my experience creating packaging designs in the food and beverage/gift sphere, specialty finishes are incredibly useful to elevate a design and create something truly luxurious. Right off the top, foil makes something look elegant and expensive, though it comes with some challenges when considering recyclability. Matte and gloss plates add texture and interest to a design and some tactility when someone runs their fingers over the design. Soft touch is another coating that is tactile and adds a soft matte look to the printed materials. Embossing adds dimensionality and both metal and paper take embossing nicely, though you can do more with it in metal. Different paper stocks also change the result of a project: silver board adds a metallic effect that can be masked out with a white layer, kraft gives things a more natural look and textured papers change the overall feel of a piece.
Here I’ve broken down what would be provided to a printer to achieve a packaging design project. This is from my time at Purdys Chocolatier and is a box sleeve design for the celebration of Raksha Bandhan. At Purdys, we would have the dieline provided to us: this one fits an existing gift box, but I have had to make small edits to provided dielines such as adding ear pop-up cutouts to match my illustration. As each printer only has a specific number of plates on their line, I always have to make sure that my finishes and colour plates don’t exceed that number (CMYK is 4 plates and each Pantone is also a plate, so plates can add up fast). This sleeve has CMYK plates, a white plate, Purdys Brand Purple PMS plate, a gold foil plate, a gloss varnish plate, and a matte varnish plate. When providing files to a printer, all effect plates are in their own layer and have a spot colour assigned to them to make it easier for press. White denotes where the plate is not applied. I always like to make sure that there is artwork under foiling layers just in case alignment is slightly off. While adding in gloss and matte plates does change the colour of a background slightly, I do find that, to make the design visible in stronger lighting, I do need to make sure either the background or what I am making glossy is a darker colour, as you can see with the right side of this design.
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