Years ago, I purchased a roll of a foil material when I was first getting creative with the laser. I didn’t really know how it worked, and most instructions required a process I was wholly uncomfortable with: touching the material in-between passes. Most of my experiences touching anything between engraving and cutting meant engravings that fell out of alignment, so my poor roll of black laser foil was left mostly unused for several years.

The metallic foil shines bright red from most angles.

This year, for a New Years Party happening in just a few days, we were asked to design name badges for the attendees. For part of the design, Jen and I wanted to use a thin sticker on top the base badge acrylic, but since our normal supply of paper-thin acrylic didn’t come in red, we had to find alternatives. At some point I was reminded of the laser foil, so I ran a quick test with the black roll I’ve had on hand and quickly realized that would be the way to go.

Laser foil in rolls; one black roll from years ago and the red roll bought for this project.

The foil would have to be red, though, because of the design chosen. The badge design for this event features two small dogs sipping their drinks (art by 957thedog.com!) next to a large dumpster fire—complete with a burning “2016” sign inside—the symbolism of which I’ll leave to you to interpret. That fire wouldn’t really stand out if it was just engraved onto the same smooth silver surface the badge is made from, so red foil it would be!

There are a few different ways to use laser foil effectively, but the way I settled on is described below, and it requires a few different steps that have to be done in order.

Black fills are raster engravings, blue and red are vector cuts of varying depths.

Make sure you only run your raster engraving first—the black and grey fills will convert to halftone and result in the surface engraving seen in the photography, while (in this configuration) the blue and red lines are score and cut respectively and will be done next.

Engraving done, now to carefully apply the foil.

With raster engraving done, very carefully apply a portion of laser foil to the surface, overlapping where your blue and red lines will do the dirty work. Since the fire design element is completely enclosed, you don’t have to worry about aligning the foil too much. Just make absolutely certain you do not nudge the material out of alignment during this step. I use an old iron bookbinding bar to keep my material in place.

The foil is applied; it doesn’t need to be perfectly aligned.

Set your software up to cut the blue lines next, and then the red lines after. You don’t need to stop the process in-between unless you want to turn on air assist for the cutting portion. Once all three processing steps are completed, you’ll have a finished badge with a bunch of extra foil on it.

Peeling foil back isn’t as troublesome as peeling vinyl; not nearly as stretchy!

Carefully remove the foil. It’s not as bad as weeding vinyl, thankfully, as the foil doesn’t easily get bent out of shape. Once you’re done, a light cleaning with some denatured or isopropyl alcohol and the badge is done!

From certain angles the reflection looks even more firey.

Because of its reflective nature, the foil fire will catch reflections and create a high contrast black and red look, while the smooth silver below will be bright in low light and aid in badge visibility. I did consider for a brief time going with a classic “dumpster green”, but the back color (white) didn’t work with the design well and, frankly, the results were too ugly to even consider photographing.

Happy new year!