Designing Tax Stamps for Analogue or Digital Printing

When designing security features for tax stamps, attention is increasingly being paid to features created by digital printing, since this technology is developing very fast. However, many highly effective tax stamps, in use today, carry features printed with traditional, analogue methods, such as offset and intaglio. So, which is better? Or should both methods be used together for an optimal security solution?

This article compares three different possibilities with regard to printing tax stamps: wholly analogue printing, wholly digital, or a combination of both.

What makes a traditional security print secure?

Print quality is one of the most important factors in traditional security printing, because of the nature of the features it produces – namely, fine lines with modulated widths and sharp intaglio relief, as well as microtext, intricate guilloche designs, and rainbow printing.

The traditional security printing method results in a set of prints that are exactly the same, both visually and in terms of content, and that can be authenticated with simple tools like a magnifying glass... as long as you know what to look for. However, the problem is that people, in general, don’t know what to look for.