Printed Plastic Cards

Printed plastic cards

Bank-card size, rounded corners, printed both sides. Membership cards, staff ID, loyalty cards, gift cards, the pass that gets someone into the car park. It is the same card every time; what changes is what we put on it.

Standard stock is CR80 PVC, which is the size of the card in your wallet. Short runs go through the digital press; long runs go litho. You choose matte or gloss. Nobody has ever regretted matte.

Things you can add

• A magnetic stripe, encoded to your system.
• Barcodes or QR codes, unique per card if you send us the data.
• Individual names and numbers, merged from a spreadsheet. Useful for name badges that have to look like they were made on purpose.
• A signature panel.
• A slot or a punched hole so the card hangs off a lanyard clip without a holder.
• Foil, usually gold or silver, and holographic overlays where the card is worth copying.

Not everything has to be PVC

PVC is the default because it is durable and cheap and it prints well. It is not the only option, and for some jobs it is the wrong one.

Board cards and wood cards for a one-off event or a brand that would rather not hand out plastic. Biodegradable plastic and Eco-lite, which is PVC-free and recyclable, for organisations with a target to report against. Recycled plastic where the look has to stay the same and the source has to change. Two specialist stocks worth knowing about: Polyart, which you genuinely cannot tear, and Picofilm, which is thin and flexible for a card that lives in a phone case.

Timing and odd sizes

Two to three weeks is normal, depending on what the artwork needs. Faster is possible; tell us the date. We also print non-standard sizes for event passes and the occasional shape that is not a rectangle.

Photo ID?

If the card needs a photo of the person, a chip, or a door-entry encoding, that is a slightly different product and it has its own page: photo ID cards.