ⓘ This article is for Event Organizers
Add a touch of luxury, elevating your badges with a high-end design by adding our metallic ink to your badges!
❗ Important: This is an extra charge per badge and the design must be built in Illustrator or InDesign.
Please work with your Relationship Manager if this is something you'd like to add to your badge.
Is Your Design a Good Candidate for Metallic Ink?
Before getting started, it's important to know that not all badge designs work well with metallic ink. Here's what our print team needs in order to make it work:
✅ Metallic ink works best when your design has:
Clean, simple vector shapes and solid color fills
Light or mid-tone colors (gold, silver, light blue, etc.)
Flat vector text or logos
❌ Metallic ink will not work if your design includes:
Embedded images (PNG, JPEG, or TIFF files) — raster images cannot receive metallic ink
White elements — white cannot hold metallic ink; white will always print as white
Sketch-style, textured, or hand-drawn illustrations — these must be fully redrawn as clean vector art, which will change the look and feel of the design
Dark colors — dark metallic ink looks the same as regular dark ink and loses the metallic effect entirely
❗ Important: If any element on your badge is not 100% vector, it cannot receive metallic ink. If the Silver layer and the base layer are not a pixel-perfect match, silver ink will bleed outside the artwork edges and affect print quality.
Designing Your Badge with Metallic Ink
When designing a badge with metallic ink, you will start with our normal process — design the Badge Shell and include the colors where you want metallic ink applied.
For reference: Metallic Badge Design Infography.pdf
1. In Illustrator or InDesign, create a 4x6" or 4x3" formatted design. If doing a double-sided design, ensure page 1 is the front and page 2 is the back of the badge.
2. Complete your Badge Shell design on Layer 1.
All artwork images must be vector. Do not use embedded images (PNG, JPEG, TIFF). Raster files cannot receive metallic ink and will cause your file to be rejected.
Leave enough white space on the front of the badge for onsite attendee data to be printed.
3. Create the Metallic Ink layer. Duplicate the exact vector art you want to be metallic, place it on its own layer, and name this layer "Silver".
The Silver layer must be an exact duplicate of the corresponding art on Layer 1. Any misalignment between the two layers will cause silver ink to bleed outside the artwork edges.
Do not include the white space where attendee data will be printed.
Metallic ink works best with lighter colors. Avoid dark colors — they will not show a noticeable metallic effect.
White cannot be metallic. Do not include white elements on the Silver layer.
4. In the Swatches Panel, create a new Swatch Fill Color and name it "Silver".
5. In the Color Type dropdown, select "Spot Color".
6. Apply this swatch to everything on the Silver layer.
7. If you have a back-of-badge design, repeat steps 3–6 for page 2.
Submitting Your Design
Once you have completed your Badge Shell (Layer 1) and Silver layer (Layer 2), save your file following these requirements:
File must be a PDF Print Ready file
Formatted to badge size (4x6" or 4x3") — not full page (8.5x11")
Front of badge on page 1, back of badge (if applicable) on page 2, submitted as 1 file
Front and back cannot be on the same page or sent as two separate files
Crop and bleed marks must be included
If full bleed, the design must extend 1/8" past the badge edge (4.125" x 6.125" or 4.125" x 3.125")
Email your completed file to operations@expoapss.com for review and approval before it goes to print.
