Fine detail refers to the line weight used in your artwork, and includes the small dots and serifs on fonts.
Fine Detail According to Stock
The finest detail for embossing is largely dependent on the paper stock – thinner uncoated stocks hold fine detail when embossed the best, while thicker rigid or coated stocks do not hold fine detail as well.
The thickness of the paper as well as the rigidity will affect how fine of detail is suitable in your design. We offer a very wide range of stocks, each of which may affect the way your embossed detail turns out. As such we do not recommend to place an embossed order "run-as-is" unless it is a repeat order. Choosing the "online PDF proof" option before production will give you the benefit of our Prepress Team's review of your files - they may make recommendations to change your design to better suit your chosen stock. If you are ordering a custom job please make sure you upload files with your quote request so an Estimator can let you know if they think the chosen paper stock will not be suitable.
Fine detail can be as small as 1pt on soft uncoated stocks 16pt or thinner. Coated stocks and thicker uncoated stocks can be more rigid and will have lower tolerances for embossing, meaning details in the design will need to be larger.
Line Weight and Embossing
Although increasing your line weight may make the design look thicker than desired, it is important to keep in mind that the embossed effect is visually thinning due to the curved surface of the emboss. Embossed artwork appears thinner than it does when viewed as a flat design. We recommend to choose sans-serif fonts as the font size will not need to be increased as much to meet the minimum line weight as it would with serif fonts.
1pt is our minimum recommended line weight, with a few points to consider:
if your design is to be blind embossed (not registered to ink printing) it is highly recommended to use a thicker line weight, since the effect of a blind emboss is much more subtle. Small embossed text registered to ink printing can still be readable while this same text created in a blind emboss may not be legible.
Spacing between printed elements should also be kept at a minimum 1pt.
If you're using negative space for your artwork, the minimum recommended line weight is increased to 2pt.
The finer the detail in your artwork, the less precise the registration of ink printing to embossing will be. 2pt line weight or higher generally has better results for registered embossed designs.
The larger you can make details in the artwork for embossing, the more impact it will have, so we do not recommend a large amount of fine detail.