At Complete Colour, we're extremely proud of our 6th printed desktop calendar. It's beautiful to look at and touch, offering a daily reminder as to how we can all help to address global climate and biodiversity challenges.
We create the calendar to present material and embellishment nuances, but also to brighten desks across Australia. Every page has been carefully curated and enhanced to celebrate this nation's Environmentally Responsible Future.
Drop us an email if you've never had a Complete Calendar and you'd like to collect or have us deliver one to you personally – at no cost.
Print options are wide-ranging and often challenging to envisage – to have 20 examples in front of you helps to build an understanding and a trust around the quality, service and value available.
See the images featured below, with an explanation of how we print and embellish these images underneath.
Enhancements and embellishments explored in print for our 2024-25 FY Calendar
Hot metallised foil stamping (also known as blocking or foiling) uses letterpress printing process for impact – applying foil instead of ink with a heated, metal die – in a wide range of colours and styles. For example, we've used gold on the wharf statue above, and rainbow on the wings of the hummingbird on the red bottle brush.
We play with the ocean, turbines and wooden path in the wind farm landscape above to show the contrast between spot wet on dry gloss and matt machine varnish.
The rock-like stromatolites from WA above were great fun to deboss, creating a recessed relief effect for a wild and raw feel.
The deep, soft sunset light behind the shed (in the middle above) was ideal to showcase soft touch lamination, providing a gentle texture and a deep, rich, long-lasting, premium finish.
Textured Matt Laminate was perfect for our quokka, showcasing a texture that you just want to reach out and touch – just like a quokka!
Matt Laminate vs Gloss Laminate
Applying a standard gloss varnish with the contrast of a standard matt varnish is an affordable way to bring a new depth and richness to imagery. We compare the two, side-by-side, by cutting the page in half on the rock formation photograph above.
Matt film provides a sheen and texture that mutes dark colours, but overall has a classy, high-end look – a level of sophistication that isn't trying to grab attention by being shiny.
Conversely, gloss film has a shiny finish to deepen and lift artwork – light bounces off rich, deep colours – with a striking look, providing an added layer of protection for longevity.
The bright blue sky around artist Richard Moffat's Snowy River Sphere in Cooma is enhanced by applying a gloss laminate and then spot coating with a clear Matt UV.
What is a Spot UV finish?
Applying anti-scuff matt laminate and coating with a clear, high-gloss spot UV enables patterned images to integrate seamlessly with printed images, drawing people in to run fingers over the page. We've used this treatment on the cover of our '24-25 Calendar.
The photograph above of the eco-friendly mixed-use dual high-rise flat in Sydney's Central Park was great for adding a spot gloss UV coating to give the windows a realistic reflective quality.
High-build spot UV varnish creates an embossed-effect coating using a clear UV Varnish with a raised texture feel. This embellishment allowed us to bring the solar panels above to life with with a raised finish which catches light when the page is turned. It brings a fairly straight-forward image to life.
Spot glitter UV Varnish is a speckled and reflective finish, available in a wide range of standard colours, including gold, silver and rainbow – great for packaging, greeting cards and magazines. We've brought the yellow bottle brush out around the bee using a little sparkle.
A sandpaper textured UV Varnish produced a raised finish to give texture to the rusted car sculpture.
How was the calendar printed?
The calendar was printed offset and digital using vegetable-based inks. The amazing architecture at Bunjil Place (City of Casey Council Offices) features for our monthly planner, offering the opportunity for us to compare digital and offset printing. Offset excels in producing high quality prints, particularly for larger sizes and high quantities, at a lower cost per page. Digital offers convenience and quicker turnaround times; ideal for short-run production.
All offset printed pages were produced by Complete using Kodak Sonora XTRA Process Free Printing Plates. We use Process Free Plates to eliminate the need for chemicals, which reduces the use of water and electricity in prepress. This saves time, resources, energy, cost, and variability – reducing our impact on the environment and keeping costs down. We pass those savings on to clients for optimal quality, service and value.
All stock was supplied by our partners at Spicers Australia. The grain silo image allowed us to trial vibrant colours on both coated and uncoated stocks; coated accentuating the vibrancy and uncoated providing a more natural look.
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