Fedrigoni Embossing

As part of my concept for the Fedrigoni brief I decided to emboss the word 'paper' on the front of the calendar. The tagline for their London shwroom is 'a place for paper'. I thought it would be really nice if the paper itself could say the word 'paper' without any ink or printing process, embossing seemed like the obvious solution.

To emboss the paper, first I created a mould or stencil by cutting the shape I wanted to emboss out of some card. Then I used a bone folder to push of all the edges around the stencil. Above are a couple of test pieces. I found the best way to do it was to use a reverse mould and push the paper through from the back so you can't see the marks the bone folder makes on the paper.

I made a stencil of the word 'paper' with the typeface I had designed

I wanted to make the embossing deep so it was really clear and easy to read. However when I put two layers of card on top of one another it was too deep and the paper I was embossing ripped when I went round the edges with the bone folder, as you can see in the image below.

I chose to emboss the belly band for the calendar because I really liked the contrast between the coloured paper of the belly band and the thick off white cover stock, it also meant I could showcase more of the Fedrigoni paper range, which was one of the requirements of the brief.

I experimented with a couple of colours for the belly band, I settled on the dark blue because I felt that it was in keeping with the understated, classy feel of the calendar.