Transparent material

Did you know that we can also make cards on colored material?
It is an ideal solution for prestigious club cards or exclusive business cards, among others.

Our printing house usually uses white PVC sheets, but we also have other substrate options for plastic cards.

On this page you will learn a bit about transparent material, incl. for which cards we use it and what additional options can be used in the production of transparent cards.

Plastic transparent cards are printed on transparent PVC, which is as durable as white or colored material.

Cards can be fully or partially transparent, which allows for very original design effects. It all depends on the graphic design.

Most often, transparent material is used for the production of business cards, which in effect become an exclusive advertisement of the company and have a positive effect on its image.

A transparent card may contain various additional elements that we use in standard cards, for example: glitter printing, hologram or selective varnish.

Please note that for printing with offset technology of your basic project, we use a palette consisting of four colors: blue, pink, yellow and black (CMYK for short). It is impossible to obtain a white color from these colors. Additionally, the paints are not 100% opaque, which means they are slightly transparent in themselves.

The transparent laminated material can be glossy and matt.
With matte rough lamination, we can get the so-called the effect of frozen plastic, the so-called frosted surface effect.

The following card is an example of the use of offset printing (CMYK), screen printing (white under the bee) and matte lamination.

If there are any white elements in your design, they will take the color of the base (plastic).

However, we have a way to get white and, therefore, greater coverage. The white color can be applied to transparent plastic in another department of our company using a screen printing machine.

Of course, this involves the need to match both printing techniques, so you need to take into account the appropriate preparation of files for printing. We provide technical support, so feel free to contact us with any questions.

Below we show you how to prepare the files to get the bee card :).

How to prepare a design for printing a transparent card with white overprint

As you can see, two files have been prepared: one for offset and one for white silk-screen ink. The files should be prepared preferably in PDF, in curves and must contain the so-called bleeds, i.e. graphics increased by min. 1.5 mm on each side. These bleeds will be cut off during the process of cutting cards from the sheet.

We encourage you to read our specification available here.