Natural Wood Veneer-Unique Green Packaging and Branding

Nov

2009

Written by: Shawn | Filed Under: graphic design | Add a Comment

Natural Wood Veneer heading

Creative packaging can make the difference between whether a product gets noticed or is just passed by.

Just think of the variety of product materials used in the designs at TheDieLine.com.

If you’re looking for something really unique to print your designs on, consider natural wood veneer.

Real Green Packaging

Northern Sheer Veneer (based in Spooner, Wisconsin) manufactures natural wood veneer. Their wood veneers can be used to create unique, beautiful and green product packaging.

Everybody these days seems to be on a “green” kick, but these guys take it seriously.

You really can’t get much more green than wood–unless someone figures out a way to print on soil.

Natural wood veneer—made from actual wood (cherry, maple and white birch)—can be used in just about any type of packaging where you’d normally use paper, cardboard or plastic:

CD/DVD packaging
Boxes and product packaging
Labels
Business cards and branding materials
Gift cards, brochures, mailers, and promotional materials

This wood veneer can be stained, printed on, etched, laser-cut, embossed, and combined with other materials for endless looks.

Wood veneer can be placed on a variety of backing materials and scored; allowing it to be rolled, wrapped, or folded and creased for use in boxes for product packaging.

This is really amazing stuff.

Tip: For more box design ideas, check out our vector templates article.

1st Impressions

sample-box The folks at Northern Sheer Veneer were kind enough to send me a sample pack.

It contained several different thicknesses of veneer in all 3 species of wood, veneers applied to a variety of backing materials, sample product boxes and a beautifully printed display box.

Oh yeah, and their business cards are made from wood veneer too.

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I opened the package, but the samples and boxes blew me away.

To say these made a powerful 1st impression would be an understatement.

Printing Quality On Wood Veneer

One of the things that really impressed me about the samples was the quality of the printing.

The grain of the wood had very little if any effect on the coverage of the ink. Lines and details were crisp and even small lettering and text was very easy to read and didn’t bleed.

Speaking with Tim Doyle, Owner of NSV, he explained the reason.

“We use types of wood that have a tighter grain, such as white birch, cherry and maple. These types of wood work best for printing because of their grain structure.”

While other woods like oak can be used for veneer, these must be cut from the log at a greater thickness and then sanded down to the finer grain. This means that much of the log is wasted during the sanding process.

NSV peels the pieces of veneer from the log at the proper thickness—it’s never sanded down. This means 4000+ board feet of usable veneer can be gained from one tree.

Some of the wood was also stamped and embossed, others had gold and silver inlaid in the wood. Very nice.

Types of Printing Used With Wood Veneer

Flexo
Offset
Silk screening
Digital (with fast or hard drying inks)

The wood veneer can also be die cut, laser cut or routed.

Printing on Your Printer

Printing test I did a test print just using my Samsung laser printer.

I placed a piece of 11 point white birch with latex backing in my manual feed, set the paper thickness to card stock and voila! Beautifully printed goodness.

Any veneer 11 point or less should print fine through a laser printer. If you get any thicker than 11 point though, your home printer may not like it.

Note: I was told that using an inkjet printer is not recommended because the ink does not cover the wood as well as other printing processes.

You can learn more about natural wood veneer and various printing information on their FAQ page.

Professional Printing

While Northern Sheer Veneer doesn’t do any printing themselves, they have several partners that provide wood veneer printing services and products that use wood veneer from Northern Sheer Veneer.

So What Options Do You Have With Wood Veneer Packaging?

Northern Sheer Veneer uses cherry, maple and white birch veneers in a variety of thicknesses.

Some of the samples were so thin you could see through them (about the consistency of interfacing material).

The variety of thicknesses available means the wood veneer can either be used alone or with a variety of backing materials such as:

Paper board (18, 15, and 12 point)
Craft paper (7 point)
Latex paper
Spantex paper

They can also produce double-sided veneer with other materials sandwiched between for added durability, such as:

Poly liner
Latex (5 millimeter)
Paper board

You can even get wood veneer with a pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) and release liner—letting you stick the veneer to surfaces like:

Metal
Glass
Plastic
Other woods

The PSA option is NSV’s label stock; letting you create beautiful wood labels that can be adhered to nearly any smooth/semi-smooth surface.

You can also special order veneer attached to vinyl, magnetic strips, styrene, or just about anything else you can think of.

For a complete list of veneer thicknesses, wood types and mounting/backing materials, take a look at their Products page.

Other Wood Grain Patterns

As mentioned above, white birch, cherry and maple are the best types of wood because of the type of grain they have.

But what if you wanna print on oak or some other type of wood?

You can get birch (which has practically no visible grain) and print the grain of another type of wood onto it before printing your actual design.

Want oak? Want the look of old barn wood? No problem. The grain patterns available are not repetitive, so only a trained wood expert would notice the difference.

What’s Possible With Wood Veneers?

Here are just a few examples of what can be done with wood veneer. Many of these photos are from the actual sample pack Northern Sheer Veneer sent me.