• March 29, 2024

Christmas card is at the cutting edge

This year’s Christmas card from Iggesund Paperboard could well become a collector’s piece.

It has been produced by the van Heertum Design agency, which has made a name for itself by not flinching from design commissions that demand both complex printing and intricate finishing.

The motif is a starry sky with depictions of reindeer and celestial objects created through the use of extremely fine laser cutting of Iggesund’s Invercote board, complemented with the application of several foils and then printed with three PMS inks.

‘The tabs attaching the laser-cut sections to the rest of the card are so fine that they are hard to see, and it is only thanks to Invercote’s superior tear strength that the card stays in one piece,’ said an Iggesund press note.

Iggesund has a tradition of creating intricate Christmas cards that demonstrate and, in the best cases, stretch the limits of what can be achieved with Invercote as the base material.

“We want to produce more than a Christmas card, we want designers to challenge Invercote and give us something that reflects its essence,” said Carlo Einarsson, director market communications at Iggesund Paperboard.

‘Frans van Heertum, founder of van Heertum Design and winner of a number of awards for sophisticated printing projects, has done large, advanced projects a number of times using Invercote as the base material,’ the press note said. ‘One recent project is his contribution to Iggesund’s Black Box Project, in which he printed a series of cards. Each paperboard sheet was printed using three different techniques and more than 30 inks and varnishes. The printed sheets then passed through various finishing stages a total of 14 times.

‘The card is made of Invercote Creato 350 g/m2 and van Heertum Design VHD was responsible for both the design and implementation. The agency was assisted by a group of Dutch suppliers, such as the printers Drukkerij Tielen, Boxtel, and the foil printers Hensen Foliedrukkers, Oirschot, using foil supplied by Leonhard Kurz Benelux of Nijmegen. The characteristic laser cutting was done by Point to Paper, Waalwijk.’