This 12 by 39 inch vinyl banner combines raised foil and varnish with soft touch lamination. Most shops stick to cold lamination on vinyl because standard hot lamination settings will melt it, we ran it hot anyway since the savings, roughly 3 to 10 times cheaper in material costs, were worth solving for, which meant dialing heat and dwell time precisely enough to laminate without melting the material. That same precision carried over to the foil: raised foil needs exact settings to hold fine detail before the varnish cures, or it fills in and blurs, something most shops struggle with even on regular paper stock, let alone something this heat sensitive.

02 / GOLD LEAF AWARD — DIGITAL FOIL (VARNISH ADHESIVE): HOLIDAY CORPORATE FAVOR BOXES

This one runs two foil passes, red and silver, on top of variable data: every box in the batch gets a different name stamped in raised foil, done digitally rather than through a fixed plate. Raised UV coating adds a second layer of texture and depth over that. The whole box is digitally die cut too, no physical die needed, so we can prototype one fully customized box in under half an hour or run ten thousand without slowing down. I designed the box and the embellishment layout, working out how the two foil colors and the raised UV would sit together on the box.

03 / SILVER LEAF AWARD — DIGITAL EMBELLISHMENTS (FOLDING CARTON): HOLIDAY CORPORATE GIFT BOXES

Each box in this run got a different name, stamped in foil instead of printed. Doing variable data in foil is rare industry wide, most shops find it too cost inefficient to run, bigDAWGS can do it affordably, and that capability alone is part of why this piece stood out. The die cut itself opens like a star, blooming open to reveal the gift instead of lifting off a lid. I designed the whole box from scratch: the die cut structure, the foil pattern across the icons, branches, and type, a soft touch coating that makes it feel more like fabric than paper, and a textured finish you can actually feel under your fingers.

This one skips foil and gloss entirely, just a clean die cut and fold. The card folds into a tent shape, a small nod to the industry it's built for, with the agent's photo cut to stand up above the fold like a tiny greeter. Simple enough to leave in a stack on a foyer table at a showing, sturdy enough to stand there and do the work on its own. We tested them at a real estate expo in Toronto, just set a few out standing on the tables. A crowd gathered around them anyway, people couldn't stop picking them up.

05 / BRONZE LEAF AWARD — EMBELLISHMENTS WITH TECHNOLOGY: GIDEON PORTFOLIO VIDEOBOOK (HARDCOVER)

This one was Gideon's project, an intern I was mentoring at the time. I suggested the hardcover videobook format instead of a normal printed portfolio, a book someone can hold and open does more in a design job search than a stack of pages ever will. The gold foil pattern is Gideon's own branding, not a generic border, because plain raised foil gets forgotten and a pattern tied to someone's actual identity doesn't, so I walked him through building it that way instead of defaulting to a flat foil block. Inside, an embedded screen plays a reel the moment it opens, and a built in NFC chip means one tap of a phone pulls up a full contact menu, no one has to remember a portfolio link. Foil, screen, and tap to contact all do the same job: make the object work harder than a normal resume can.

The foil here does two separate jobs: holographic catches light and shifts as the card moves, grabbing attention before anyone even touches it, and raised means there's actual texture under a thumb, not just color. Touch research out of Clemson found people choose tactile packaging over flat about three times as often, so the texture is doing real work here, not just a nice to have. The NFC chip sits embedded inside the paper itself instead of a visible sticker or insert, so the card looks completely ordinary until someone taps it, the surprise is the whole point. One tap pulls up a full digital menu, contact info, social links, video, and feeds straight into Google Ads retargeting, turning a simple handshake into an actual marketing touchpoint.

The pink to blue gradient isn't standard CMYK, four color process struggles to hit true vibrant pink and warm tones, so this ran on a Fujifilm Revoria PC1120 with an added pink channel specifically to close that gap and get closer to the color range you'd see on a screen instead of the muddier pink CMYK alone produces. The gold foil is raised, built by an MGI machine that lays down liquid varnish droplet by droplet through its printhead. Those droplets naturally pull toward each other and merge if they land too close, which kills fine detail, so the varnish cures under UV light almost instantly to lock each drop's shape before that can happen. Getting genuinely fine lines comes down to controlling exactly how much liquid each droplet drops and how fast it cures, then running the foil roller at the right temperature so the foil grabs cleanly onto lines that fine. Open it and a video screen embedded in the paper wakes up and starts playing. The award recognizes the embellishment work specifically, the color science and the foil process are what actually won it.