Embossing

Take a look at your credit card. See how the numbers are raised on the front, and kind of ‘indented’ at the back? That’s embossing. And you can give your labels the same look and feel, whether it’s raised text, raised images or a complex texture.
Embossing is done with two dies:

• A ‘male’ die with a reversed image of what you want to emboss (like the back-to-front numbers on the back of your credit card). This will be pressed into the back of the surface to ‘push’ the material out.
• A ‘female’ die hollowed out with the reverse image of the male die (but slightly larger) so that when the male and female dies are pressed together they are almost a perfect fit.

We then sandwich the material between the two dies and push them together. The result? A label with raised surface on the front and an indented surface on the back (or the other way around if you swap the male and female dies).

While a lot of people think all embossing is ‘embossing in register’, that’s not the case. It’s where the dies are designed to fit a printed, foil blocked or otherwise illustrated image exactly (again, like the numbers on your credit card) to give you a detailed image, gold-foil lettering, or other design raised above the label’s surface.

‘Combination embossing’ refers specifically to raising an image already stamped in foil.