Impressions – Asides on offset and digital dialogue

I’ve been struck by the UK-based GDL Network’s launch of PrintCafé, a new take on the high street printer, and how such grass roots activity is a much more effective way of encouraging the use of print than any amount of industry-body-based proselytizing such as PrintPower.

Students queuing out of the door of a shop in the snow to buy print are a far more effective advert for the effectiveness of paper-based communication than a load of full-page ads in magazines.
It’s also a win-win for printers and punters; rather than, whatever way you cut it, a tax on the industry to support a top-down message.

PrintCafé is the DIY ethos of punk, digital and online writ large. PrintPower has a more fusty, old-school attitude, more about having a quiet word with a decent chap, who knows a man with the ear of the minister, than getting stuck in on the front line.

What is striking about the PrintCafé concept is that it acknowledges there is an unmet need – and desire – for print, in particular amongst students and recent graduates. They get the power of print, they want print for their coursework, they want to use print as part of their personal and professional promotion; because good quality print is a powerful communicator of competence and professionalism.

A well-printed business card is still a powerful thing, remember Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, I bet the kids do. Hats off to Brett Easton Ellis for that bit of powerful print promotion, it just about makes up for helping rehabilitate Huey Lewis and the News and Phil Collins.

Tony Barnett, managing director of John E Wright, who has opened the first five PrintCafés get the issue. Print still isn’t as easy to access and use as it could be. He’s made it approachable with a modern high-street location – itself a brave move in the current retail climate – and attempted to take away the mystique. If we want print to be used it has to be easy to use. There are friendly, helpful staff willing to show those without their knowledge how to prepare work for print and hand hold them through the process; with free guides to take away so they can do it by themselves next time. That strikes me as a more effective approach than a display ad attempting to mesmerise the audience. That is assuming the audience is even there. The flight from the printed page shows that the ad-supported print publishing model is broken, but newspapers and magazines are only a proportion of print. It is the other bits – stationery, flyers, business cards, presentations, pitches and posters that are required by small businesses and freelancers that PrintCafé is targeting – that is where the new demand lies.

Lastly, the high street approach rather than the moral high ground offers a great ROI. It’s a low investment for a powerful and direct uplift in sales, and more importantly profit – Barnett claims 25% higher sales and 100% more profit. The upfront cost: a few grand for a lick of paint, new carpets and printed branding; and a monthly fee in the hundreds, for sales uplift in the thousands.

So to answer the question: At first glance, yes.

Printing for consumers has been on my mind this week, in particular what a minefield it has the potential to be.

First I visited Precision Printing in Barking which is currently on the midst of its busiest period producing printed photo products. Sensibly it realised that developing a system that could handle 25,000 orders a day was enough of a challenge, even for a clued up business and technology savvy printer like itself, so has gone down the route of being a trade supplier and left the stuff that’s out of its comfort zone – consumer marketing and a consumer e-commerce website – to its clients, who it would be fair to say would have an equally steep learning curve to get to grips with production. This makes it a great partnership that plays to everyone’s strengths.

Secondly, I got a call from Derric Landor, whose Phototex digitally printable repositionable wallpaper was featured on UK primetime TV show Channel Five’s Gadget Show.

What a marketing coup.

Exposure to hundreds of thousands, if not a couple of million, of potential customers showing your product in a positive light. And with the TV company’s website having that segment of that show easily accessible for a year a gift that keeps on giving. Or should do.

Unfortunately one of the firms that Five lists on its website as being able to produce digital wallpaper (although it’s worth adding it isn’t using Landor’s special substrate, which he argues is the key to ease of use and long life) falls down woefully on customer experience. A call at the end of standard business hours elicited a response that was terse and dismissive, from someone who didn’t even know the programme had been aired, despite being happy to use the Gadget Show logo on its homepage.
If I was after ordering several hundred pounds worth of bespoke print for my home, I’d expect to speak to a friendly and knowledgeable person in my own time in the evening. Instead the response was as cold as last week’s weather, making me feel like it was a terrible imposition to be interested in their business.

Unfortunately the example above where a printer has reached out directly to the customer highlights our sector’s naïveté when it comes to dealing with consumers. Precision, despite being a textbook and award winning example of customer service and marketing in the B2B market, was smart enough to realise when it came to dealing with consumers it needed to work with experts.

Hopefully the next time print gets a spot in the limelight the firms that feature will do as a favour and be a bit more customer-focused.

Hats off to Fespa for getting stuck into a dialogue with ad agencies and the wider creative community at the Eurobest conference next month.

The organisation’s twofold aim of showing creatives what is possible with print and also taking on board what it is they want to achieve so it can help its printer members to develop better offerings for them is laudable.

One of the things that surprises me whenever I talk to the creative community is just how much they love and value print, and yet, often as not, aren’t au fait with all that is possible. It’s not just the latest developments such as variable data that they aren’t aware of, often it’s also ways production techniques, materials and substrates can add impact and appeal.

There’s also a much more mundane issue that every printer needs to address, and that’s helping their clients get the most out of the tools they use to design for print.

At last week’s PrintWeek webcast Success in practice: Workflow, the biggest issue to arise was about making it easier for designers to work with their printers. Although it was agreed that technology driven solutions such as web-to-print and JDF job ticketing were all agreed to help make things easier, the thing that stood out as the most important way to improve things for both sides was education. Spending time showing designers how to make and submit decent files and pointing them in the direction of the online guides available from the likes of the Ghent Workgroup is an easy win for everyone.

While it may not be as exciting as showing the creative heights that can be scaled, helping clients in the foothills of file preparation makes it easier to print, and that’s as important a part of making print an appealing part of the media mix.

Greenpeace recently scored itself a publicity coup by hijacking a paper industry awards ceremony to present controversial paper and forestry firm APP with a “Golden Chainsaw” award.

The story has got our forum buzzing, as can be seen in the message trail underneath the story. One poster “Oscar” accused PrintWeek of bias and posted a link to a report that he claimed redressed the (im)balance. His point was picked up by “Stanley Dingtype”, who asked whether the act of reporting this event was itself biased. The straight answer to that is no, as our news editor Simon Nias adds on the thread.

However, “Stanley” then goes on: “I think that occasionally a report has to contain some ‘balancing’
opinion to remain unbiased, especially when published in a paper that
represents the interests of the victim (ie our Paper Industry).”

To refer to the victim of Greenpeace’s activity as “our paper industry” is taking things a little too far. It singled out one controversial organisation, APP. By the same token anyone who criticised any one of a myriad of controversial print companies on these forums (as happens on an almost daily basis) could be accused of “attacking the print industry”.

The environment is a big issue for print and paper – allegations of bad practice can taint the whole sector, affecting the livelihoods of hundreds in the supply chain. This is one reason why PrintWeek strives very hard to be unbiased, fair and accurate. That includes looking beneath the surface of what we are told, regardless of the source or subject matter.

I too was intrigued by Oscar’s post and the press release he references http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101117005558/en.

Having read his comment I wanted to find out more about Mr Moore as I was unfamiliar with him. I have since downloaded the full report he published http://www.scribd.com/asiapulppaper regarding his trip to Indonesia. It has raised some additional questions, not least being why it has been uploaded to Scribd by APP rather than by Mr Moore or his organisation Greenspirit Strategies http://www.greenspirit.com?

I also carried out a brief search on his background and found this reference http://www.powerbase.info/index.php?title=Greenspirit_Strategies to him and Greeenspirit Strategies on a site called Powerbase http://www.powerbase.info/index.php?title=Main_Page which keeps a list of PR firms and lobbyists. I cannot speak for the veracity of the information on this site; however, the more one looks into the claims and counterclaims concerning APP, the more convuluted the story becomes.

Unfortunately, I have no easy answer as yet as to who the heroes and villains are. However, APP is in the firing line as far as Greenpeace is concerned and regardless of PrintWeek’s coverage, this kind of publicity stunt by the NGO will – rightly or wrongly – continue until APP satisfies its critics that it is beyond reproach.

Last week I wrote about the uptake of digital for higher-volume wide-format print apps and how the price of ink was now the biggest barrier to the process’ further encroachment on the analogue world of screen and litho Cost is now the only constraint for large-format digital.

So when Agfa went big on the low ink consumption of its latest wide-format machines when it unveiled its offerings for SGIA. First off, it reminded me that this wasn’t the first time Agfa’s inkjet vice president had made these claims, he said the same thing at Fespa Digital in Amsterdam last year but it seems to be a claim that has lain uncontested or commented on.

Last week Barham added more detail. Saying that the M-Press Tiger and the new Jeti 3020 Titan sipped ink in comparison with rival high-end offerings. The average coverage per litre was 150sqm, and Barham said that as a result these machines ink consumption was “at least 50% reduced compared to HP’s FB7500”. Of course, there’s no point bragging about low ink consumption if you then claw back the cost through charging more per litre so you end up with the same sort figure for ink cost per square metre. However Barham says that “everyone is competitive on ink price”, which suggests that Agfa users may have a genuine advantage in this respect.

Agfa says that in part that is due to its use of greyscale print heads, and in particular small droplet sizes (the smallest is 8picolitre) to produce very thin ink films on the substrate, compared to rivals using 30 or 42pl droplets. So this may be a short lived advantage until greyscale heads become the norm and everyone has the same capability and lower ink consumption.

All this sort of stuff is just the sort of claim and counterclaim (just like those for quality and productivity figures) where independent testing would prove handy to help printers to establish what is hype and what is reality.

Regardless of the detail, it’s hard to ignore any claim that cuts up to 50% of ink costs, if those costs are the biggest restraint on the increased adoption

Large-format digital is growing up at last. In fact it could be said
to be better than litho or screen in most instances.
This week we have two stories on Inca Onset customers installing
multiple machines to meet customer demand 

Both Augustus Martin and Imprint are British and both
are firms with a pioneering attitude to digital. What is significant
though is they both report that the work that their Onsets were needed
for isn’t new digital work; it’s new to digital work, which was
previously produced using screenprint or litho.

The long awaited tipping point from analogue to digital may finally be upon us.

Augustus Martin joint managing director Lascelle Barrow even said that
digital was better than screen print and litho because it’s quicker to
set-up, easier to colour manage and perhaps most importantly produces
little or no make ready waste.

When a litho job, if it’s a short run, may need more makeready sheets
than the actual run length it’s pretty obvious that something is amiss
and the process is far from perfect.
But if digital is so good why aren’t these stories accompanied by the
news that Augustus Martin and Imprint are jettisoning their screen and
litho print lines at the same time as adding additional digital
firepower?

It’s the economy stupid. Or more accurately the economics.
Specifically it’s the price of digital ink. The market has hit a point
when the biggest barrier to digital’s wider adoption isn’t about what
it can or can’t do; it’s purely down to cost.
The market may have hit an impasse. Ink prices won’t fall until
volumes rise, and volumes won’t rise until ink prices fall.

What will be worth watching is how this scenario plays out. Is it a
question of the chicken and the egg, or is it a game of chicken
between printers and ink suppliers, where who wins determines the pace
of the next wave of print’s digitisation?

Large-format print is at the heart of a battle between the great and the good of the art world and the Italian authorities over the use of advertising hoardings in Venice.
A letter from Venice in Peril to Italian minister of culture Sandro Bondi has signatories that read like a who’s who of the creative great and good from across the worlds of art and architecture inc;uding architect Lord Foster and Victoria and Albert museum director Mark Jones.

The letter states that 10 years ago Venice was without such advertisements, and that their scale dwarfs the fine detail and proportions of the buildings around them. It also complains that as they are illuminated at night and as such are the hardest and brightest lights in town by far.

My initial reaction to the letter was to assume the advertising was to some extent paying for the restoration of the building beneath, and as such a good thing.

The letter answers that by stating that “after the great flood of 1966, when the city was in a much worse state and Italy a less rich country, no one contemplated using this method to raise funds”.

Of course, that was 40 years ago when the printing technology and possibly the substrates weren’t available to make such an option feasible.

Now we have the technology the issue is should we use it. Yes the ads are intrusive, if they weren’t they wouldn’t be doing their job. Are they too intrusive? Possibly, and some compromise is necessary.

However, it can be argued that it’s preferable to have a short-term hoarding that contributes to the upkeep of the building behind it rather than a ruin slowly sinking into the lagoon. Venice was built on commerce, isn’t it apt that advertising, the engine of  our consumer society, is being used to rebuild it?

Photos for the blind sounds like an oxymoron, surely anyone who can’t see will not be able to interpret painting with light.

However, thanks to the innovative use of digital print by photographer Juan Torre and Estudios Durero, an exhibition of images to be touched is being held by the Spanish national association of the blind ONCE in Madrid.

For the blind and partially sighted the use of touch as an alternative to sight is a familiar concept through the use of Braille for text-based work. This project extends that further and uses that same sense of touch used to read words to read pictures. It’s a fascinating idea, and one I’d love to have a chance to go and visit – I would say see, but I, ahem, feel, that in this instance it’s as important to touch the works too.

It’s obvious a lot of skill has gone into the selection of the type of images, their preparation and the choice of substrate and printing process to bring the most out of the images.

Has anything similar has been attempted before? The application of textured coatings that can be read by the fingertips would be an ideal application for screen print. But, maybe the steps to build up a multiple layers of texture from the original photograph would be too complicated and impractical using analogue rather than digital techniques.

Texture is nothing new in the visual arts, it’s long been integral to oil painting for instance, and of course sculpture, but maybe digital print offers a new era where the reproduction of visual art doesn’t stop at the image and extends to the texture too. You’d never expect a gallery to allow anyone up close to touch originals, but if digital printing, especially the emerging 3D processes, offers a way to allow a reproduction of the tactile nature of art it opens up new avenues of reproduction and interpretation of existing work and new forms of expression.

A further twist on the project’s super-sensory nature is the choice of subject matter, music and musicians, an art form already accessible to both the blind and the sighted. Truly a super synaesthetic synthesis.

By coincidence the story came to my attention in the same week that I read an article in September issue of of Wired magazine’s UK edition about the race to develop implantable retinal prostheses to return some sight to people unfortunate enough to have lost theirs’. Compared to the huge challenges, cost and the current restrictions – monochrome only and low resolution – of the high tech option, printed pictures to be touched are a more elegant, affordable and inclusive way of extending the realm of the senses for the blind and partially sighted.

From PrintWeek

Last week BP’s London operations were brought to an abrupt halt and wide-format print played an important part.

NGO Greenpeace was behind the demonstration that turned off the pumps at over 30 BP branded filling stations.

But what part did wide-format print play?

Look at the footage and there were some sophisticated examples of print on show that did an effective job of hijacking BP’s branding and replacing it with something Greenpeace believed was more apt. These weren’t naïve broad brush daubings onto an old sheet, but professional looking and colour-matched graphics, including some very neat “socks” that slipped over the top of the main filling station signs.

In a neat twist, Greenpeace is wary of anyone using its own brand to promote or in any way endorse themselves, so kept tight-lipped about its printer. Mind you, would you be too keen to woo a corporate with a case study based on helping protestors to hijack one of their peers? However, whoever these pimpernels of wide-format graphics are maybe they’ve discovered the ultimate niche, the need for discretion should hopefully ensure a decent price and a lack of competitors banging on the door to get the job.

Nor was BP alone having its brand banjaxed. On the very night that the Barclays Bank sponsored “Boris’ bikes” took to the streets of London someone had printed and applied some very professional looking alternative printed and cut vinyl to the rear mudguards that drastically altered the messaging.

Fine art digital printing is dominating our wide-format headlines this week, at two ends of the scale.

On one hand there is the news of the demise of The Art Group, a huge provider of fine art digital prints, with a list that reads like a who’s who of the high street and the art gallery.

It’s hard to imagine how what should be such a lucrative business has had such a torrid time. And while it’s doom and gloom at that commercial end of fine art, there are green shoots at the creative end with HP’s launch of a tool that enables fine art photographers and print makers to output contact negatives on its Designjet machines. I have to confess I have an interest, as in the past I have dabbled in the beautiful alternative print processes, and they were the topic of my final degree project.

Back then, 15 years ago, making contact-sized negatives was becoming difficult in the darkroom, largely as the continuous tone graphic arts films needed were on their last legs as scanning and desktop publishing did away with the complex colour separation processes of yore. At that time there were a few photographic printers playing with imagesetting film and the then novel FM screening to produce suitable negatives, but it was tricky to find a bureau or printer happy to tie up their imagesetter for a finicky photographer’s experiments.

Way back then I tried to use my desktop printer (an Epson Stylus Pro 500) to produce negatives with limited success. The high density needed was only possible with OHP films, and the coatings and inks back then limited you to a measly and gritty 360dpi. Not something compatible with the double cream tonality of a platinum print. In the end my experiments moved on and it was the combination of handmade watercolour paper that I’d come to love from printing gum bichromate, platinum and kallitype along with the humble inkjet’s colour capabilities that focused my efforts on a poor man’s giclee.

With HP’s new development I feel an urge to dust off the darkroom and go painting with light again now the latest digital technology has moved on enough to match the nuances of the nineteenth century’s finest photographic printing processes.