Gold foil wedding invitations – London & Worldwide
HOT GOLD FOIL PRINTING TECHNIQUES FOR LUXURIOUS STATIONERY
Whether you’re searching for gold foil wedding invitations, or on the day wedding stationery such as table numbers, place names or menu design, gold foiled designs can be printed onto a vast range of card and paper stocks. Gold foil printing is highly versatile and adds an instant dimension of splendour, transforming your wedding invitations from the mundane to luxury wedding invitations. Choose a lighter ethereal paper such as a sheer translucent vellum paper, a standard 250gm or 300gsm or if you’d really like to stand out from the crowd and opt for a far superior textured, velvet or weighty card or 600gsm or 1000gsm, gold foil can be applied to many surfaces to instantly add a touch of luxury to your wedding invitations.
Gold foil wedding invitations printing- to begin with, what is it and what does it mean?
Simply put, professional, gold foil wedding invitations printing is where an artisan specialist printer, uses a custom made magnesium plate to heat up and transfer a given foil design which could be large or small to a piece of stationery. This is not a printing process that I myself as a luxury wedding invitations stationery designer do myself. I much prefer to outsource this and whilst it is being printed I can carry on with calligraphy addressing envelopes or adding other design touches upon the given stationery that I’m designing.
This magnesium plate used to print gold foil wedding invitations takes at least one week to order and complete and before ordering the plate, the design work must be prepared and corrected formatted. Once a plate has been made gold foil printing can commence and depending on whether you need 10 invitations or 100 it can take 3-5 days to complete one gold foil print run.
See this link for a more detailed explanation. This entire process is time consuming and can take anywhere from 2-3 weeks.
Here’s a quick run through of the gold foil wedding invitation printing process:
- Prepare artwork for gold foiling includes making sure that lines are thick enough to be correctly foiled.
- Vectorise the artwork.
- Create a pdf formatted file in the correct size to create the right sized magnesium plate.
- Order the plate for gold foil printing which takes about a week.
- Gold foil printing can commence once paper, foil and the plate arrive.
- Gold foil printing can take about 3-7 days depending on how many items need to be printed.
The finished appearance results in a beautiful gold foil impression that is usually some shade of gold, but literally can be of an colour that you choose, from, red, orange, copper, rich to light green, silver, blue, yellow, black, pink, brown, there is a wide choice of colours that you can choose from. Below you can see the result of a normal gold foil wedding invitations design. It creates a beautiful, luxurious feel and elevates any normal paper suite, to give a special final finish, which is one step above a normal digitally colour printed stationery suite.
Why do we have to use gold foil printing and why can we not hand make the entire suite?
Previously I had a lovely client ask the question- why can we not hand paint all of the gold foil wedding invitations? The client in question, desired a complete replica of one of my collections from my portfolio to be made. For example, on my website, the Black Finesse collection is all entirely done by hand calligraphy.
As a stationery design, to develop and curate my portfolio and to expand my collections I love to create new designs with gold calligraphy ink. I have to make those designs by hand, otherwise if I had to use professional printers for every single collection I will have to pay £500+ just to design a new collection. I would become rather challenging to design new collections! Moreover professional printers that handle gold foil wedding invitations have minimum orders when taking on a foil print job.
As you can imagine, this limits me enormously as a stationery designer.
So I create all those suites (on my portfolio) by hand.
You can see an example of my work below.
Entirely hand painted wedding invitations versus gold foil wedding invitations
I use gold foil printing because normally my clients need something like 700+ pieces which is challenging to make entirely by hand.
For smaller suite orders of 1-15 luxury wedding invitations suites, if you have very limited wording and not too much copy we can consider making one or two pieces ( I mean cards such as your rsvp or invite) entirely with hand calligraphy if that is what you are looking for. If your wording is very limited, we can simply add that into the package, yet if you have lots of wording ( on your invitation) the investment needed will go up slightly – or we will need to discuss that.
We need to aim for the best composition and layout of your design as possible – this is something that I will be happy to discuss more once you book and your time slot has arrived.
When we translate your artwork “design” such as your crest design it will also be made into gold foil as well, because it literally is impossible for me within 1-2 months to make all the cards with artwork entirely by hand – so all designers use gold foil printing.
Here is an example of what I’m speaking about:
If you visit the below collection here (see image below) you can see that the crest design below has been made in gold foil on a very thick card. The calligraphy is by hand – so we can aim for a mix if you would like – BUT your design cannot be entirely by hand – the crest design would take too long.
How much do gold foil wedding invitations cost?
Hand painted luxury wedding invitations are particularly beautiful, but not everyone has higher budget level of £8,000 – £12,000 that I charge for this calibre of work. As you can imagine, for a wedding of 100 – 200 guests with a suite containing about 7 pieces (or cards) that can not only be very time consuming, taking months of labour, hence the cost.
That is why for larger weddings and due to time and budget constraints, it’s much easier to convert my designs into gold foil wedding invitations is a good alternative and the cost is more achievable and at a lower threshold.
For a wedding with 100 pieces the cost of each gold foil design can range from £200 – £500 per each individual piece, this all depends on the end design, how large it is and how complexed the design is.
For a normal luxury stationery suite on average a client requesting gold foil wedding invitations, can have the following items that they like to gold foil print:
- Wedding invitation
- Rsvp card
- Rsvp envelope address labels
- Information card
On average each client will have at least 3-4 items that they need or desire to have as their gold foil wedding invitations.
In total the cost for 100 wedding stationery suites can cost anywhere from £1000 – £1500, this is just the pure printing budget.
Custom gold foil wedding invitations
That’s the beauty of custom gold foil wedding invitations. Whenever a client or couple contacts me for some luxury wedding invitations, I ask them to select a collection from my portfolio. Or alternatively I will set about to design a completely custom gold foil wedding invitations suite ( by suite I mean a few designs/cards that coherently fit together) and create a bespoke design based on the ideas or design inspiration that they present.
When a client requests a design, or selects one of my collections, we adapt it to create a gold foil wedding stationery suite. They make select one part of a collection and design a few new bespoke pieces to go alongside their finished design.