Affordable Paper Engraving

So you’re organising the printing of a special project for your business. It might be the invitations to an awards night in your industry, it might be the dinner invitations to your company’s AGM or you might just be looking for that extra special printing process for your business cards – after all, if you can’t have the best when you’re the boss, when can you have it?

So have you considered engraving? Engraving is a unique printing process where printing plates made from steel or copper are used, and as you can imagine they are more expensive than the printing plates used in most other printing processes. However, the ink sits in the recessed wells of these plates while the printing press puts pressure on the paper and in turn pushes it into the wells and onto the ink.

The pressure forms raised letters or images on the front of the printing project, and indentations on the back. As a result the raised letters are printed with the ink and not only stand out visually, but have a tactile property too, and people will not be able to help but run their fingers over the lettering or images.

Fortunately, there is an alternative method of engraving paper which is more affordable and provides similar results, called thermography. This process is actually done after the printing process but still creates the raised effect of engraving. Specialist inks are used in the offset printing process and a powder is applied to the paper. The paper is then passed through a heater and the raised effect is created that way.

In thermography the paper is not altered so there are only raised images and letters on the front of the paper and no indentations on the back. While this gives away the process as not true engraving, it does allow you to easily use both sides of the paper for your project.

For more information about specialist printing processes, contact Print Compare now.