A printing term referring to art that extends up to the very edge of the card. Art that bleeds requires some additional printing time and attention.

Coercivity is the term used to designate how much energy is required to put information onto the magnetic stripe and therefore how immune the data is to damage from magnetic money clips and magnetic purse snaps. LoCo mag stripes are composed of iron oxide and are most commonly used in applications that do not require long term or heavy use, such as hotel keys and gift cards. The Oersted rating for a loco mag is 300 Oe.

HiCo stripes are almost immune to domestic-type magnets and so are used for your major credit cards and other applications needing a long life card, like server sign-in cards at restaurants.

The process of electronically "writing" information on to magnetic stripes or smart card chips. A blank magnetic stripe will need some information encoded onto it to work with any gift or loyalty card system. There are 2 or 3 tracks on a mag stripe that can accept data. Track 1 will accept alpha and numeric data and a total of 79 characters. Track 2 will accept numeric data only; a total of 40 characters. Track 3 also only takes numbers and has a 107 character limit. What track(s) gets encoded and data needs will be determined by your systems requirements.

Raised numbers or letters like your credit cards. We have 2 sizes available: large numbers, or the smaller all caps letters or numbers. We recommend a maximum of 3 lines of text. The raised text can be foil tipped in silver, gold, or black. If tipping is applied to a printed area, the ink must be varnished.

Flat printing or letters, numbers, or barcodes, available in almost any font or size. Colors available are black, gold, silver, red, blue, green, or white. If thermal printing is applied over ink, the ink must be varnished. Red, blue and green are best used on a white or very light colored background.

A thermal printing process that is applied over names, numbers or codes for security purposes. Available in gray with a black wavy pattern.

A clear coating applied to a card on press over a printed ink image to give the ink a glossy or matte finish and offer added durability. Varnish is necessary if any thermal printing or embossing foil tipping will be added on top of the printed image.