“We had so many incredible questions during our Managing Critical Color webinar that we taped an extra segment with our guest speaker Daniel Dejan just to get them all answered,” said Sabine Lenz, CEO of PaperSpecs.
Dejan, North American ETC Print and Creative Manager for Sappi Fine Paper/North America discussed the in-and-outs of optimizing a color management workflow, showed where most print challenges occur and how to address them to avoid costly pitfalls.
Here are his most informative answers and insights to your questions!
When it comes to an uncoated job, how will it appear on a printer’s glossy proof? Read more »
There are six sides to conventionally designed product packaging. While marketers focus on the five panels seen by most consumers, packaging designers like Apex Die also pay close attention to the sixth side: the bottoms of your boxes.
To select a bottom closure style, consider the function, budget and usage requirements of your packaging application. Some styles prioritize strength to support heavy products; others are designed for ease of use. Check out a few popular bottom closures:
Auto-Lock – Using a combination of carefully designed glue tabs and flaps, an auto-lock design automatically forms the box bottom as soon as the box is opened. Auto-lock bottoms are easy to use and create a strong base.
Sealed End – This style uses a solid flap glued the length of the packaging to seal the bottom. Sealed end bottoms are popular for food packaging and can be performed inline during product packing for some applications. Read more »
With the direct marketing industry in the grip of a series of upheavals, from the digital revolution to the economic meltdown, figuring out what’s coming next is becoming progressively more difficult. Creating effective strategies based on these expectations is the toughest part of all.
And so, faced with one new challenge after another — from increasing costs for production and materials to rising environmental concerns among consumers — marketers have intensified their push to get ahead of the industry curve. This has led to a massive scramble to determine where the most significant industry trends for next year will emerge.
To help, Deliver Magazine sat down with experts from around the country to attempt to divine what was in store for direct marketing in 2010. While a number of potential trends were discussed, there were four key areas — targeting, measurement, channel integration and prospecting among baby boomers — that kept coming up as likely hot spots for growth and innovation. Read more »
Let’s say you’re at a clothing store. You’ve finally found a pair of jeans to replace your favorite old pair – not too dark and not too tight. But before you put it in your cart, you scan the tag with your iPhone, and it connects you to a virtual world in 3D.
Like shopping with the best sales staff answering your every question, this tag activates a video presenting the product’s different styles, sizes, laundry care and carbon footprint, all animated in a clever and entertaining way.
The future is here
It’s called Augmented Reality and Alfredo Muccino predicts it will soon influence the way we shop and buy. Muccino is chief creative officer at Liquid Agency, and his expertise as a design and brand strategist makes him the go-to guy for predicting future design trends.
Muccino recently spoke in San Francisco at the annual Visual Media Alliance conference formerly known as PINC – the Printing Industries of Northern California. He explained that one problem with predictions is that today’s newest trends didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Read more »
The June PaperSpecs Webinar “Understanding the New FSC Labels” could have been called “Everything You Wanted to Know about the New FSC Labels But Were Afraid to Ask” except that attendees weren’t afraid to ask anything!
Guest speaker Monika Patel, FSC Canada’s program officer served up answers to your biggest concerns about the new labeling standards and graphic formats. And while you may see some of those new labels (FSC-STD-50-001) in use today right along with the original format (FSC-STD-40-201), the updated labels are not required until January 1, 2011.
Big Change 1: New Standard Much Simpler
Under the new FSC Labeling standard (FSC-STD-50-001), the on-product labels are much more concise. The original seven included FSC Pure, FSC Mixed Sources 1, FSC Mixed Sources 2, FSC Mixed Sources 3, FSC Mixed Sources 4, FSC Mixed Sources 5 and FSC Recycled. Come January 2011, there will be just three: Read more »
Spring always evokes feelings of renewal and growth. Naturally, Georgia Printer would take advantage of the season to communicate print’s ability to stay fresh on its Spring 2010 cover – but how to do it in a way that most readers hadn’t seen before?
Through the addition of simulated animation we were able to show that after centuries of innovation, print is still on the move.
Engaging The Senses
In previous issues, Georgia Printer explored sensory experiences created by print through texture (touch) and scent (smell). We wanted to take this approach a step further by experimenting with the illusions created through sight.
This led to our earliest decision to use fluorescent ink for a bright and eye-catching effect. With a neon hue, The Spring 2010 cover would be visually shocking enough to stand out in readers’ mailboxes. But how could we create cover art to push the idea even further? Read more »
Last year, I had two annual reports on press at the same time. One book had heavy black coverage, but dried just fine. The other had heavy blue coverage and took two extra days to dry!
On another project, the blue ink appeared to be dry, so the printer proceeded to die cut and trim the sheets. The result? The ink offset or rubbed off from one page to another on the finished product. All of the pieces had to be reprinted – at the printer’s expense.
When I worked at Nordstrom, the primary brand color was a very dark blue. Over those two years, I spent a lot of time waiting for ink to dry!
The culprit in every case? Blue. Reflex blue.
It’s in the Ink Formula
So why do some blue inks dry so slowly? The answer lies in the ink formula. Every spot color is mixed from some of the 14 mixing colors: yellow, yellow 012, orange 021, warm red, red 032, rubine red, rhodamine red, purple, violet, blue 072, reflex blue, process blue, green and black. Read more »
The Direct Mail Dynamics Webinar PaperSpecs presented in May garnered unprecedented registration and attendance numbers, so it should come as no surprise that our speaker Trish Witkowski of foldfactory.com, simply could not get to all the excellent questions posted during the session. She was gracious enough to answer them for us here.
Trish told us she had a blast doing the Webinar and also wanted to extend special thanks to Don Stuhler, her favorite mailpiece design analyst (MDA) from Rochester, New York, for helping out with the tough queries. If you missed Direct Mail Dynamics, a recording of the session is available at the Past Webinars page. This Webinar was free to the public thanks to the generous support of Neenah Paper.
Are clear/translucent envelopes machinable?
Translucent envelopes (often referred to as vellum) and clear envelopes that are plastic or poly based are considered non-machinable when used for letters (translation: you will receive the non-machinable letter surcharge). Translucent envelopes that are paper based may be automation compatible if the address/barcode does not smear. I spoke with Don on this one, and he said that overall this is a difficult issue and that they have to test them sometimes to be sure. Read more »
“Breathtakingly beautiful.” “It marks the birth of a new era.” The June 2008 “Wheat Sheet” edition of Canadian Geographic magazine was all the rage.
“We envision commercial production of wheat straw pulp in North America within the next two to four years,” Markets Initiative (now Canopy) stated at the time.
Here was a tangible solution, a perfect example of how to satisfy the increasing appetite our paper market has for environmental solutions. But to this day, you will be hard pressed to find any agri-waste papers readily stocked in North America. What happened? Was it just a fairy tale?
The Fairy Tale Characters
No fairy tale can unfold without a hero, or in our case, several heroes who were first brought together on the Canadian Geographic magazine project by Canopy: Read more »
Discussions of typographic widows and orphans normally start with an argument about definitions and what these terms precisely mean. But for the sake of this discussion – and because I’m writing it – let’s use my definitions for the time being. At the end, you can use whatever terms you like for these conditions, as long as we all agree on solutions to the problems they raise.
Most everyone agrees that a widow is a short last line of a paragraph. According to what I learned as a lad, a widow becomes a problem when it’s so short that it creates the visual impression of a blank line between paragraphs. The wider the line length (also called measure), the more impact a very short widow can have. A hyphenated widow, in which the last line of a paragraph is a morsel of a hyphenated word, is a particularly egregious subspecies.
In the following text (set in 11/14 Georgia over 25 picas), a rash of widows appears. The first paragraph has a hyphenated widow; bad in itself, it is also so short that it barely covers the 2-em paragraph indent below it. A second widow appears at the end of the third paragraph. These need to be fixed. The short line at the end of the fourth paragraph might be considered a problem if all the other last lines on the page nearly filled the measure. In this context, though, it’s marginally acceptable. Read more »
Dejan, North American ETC Print and Creative Manager for Sappi Fine Paper/North America discussed the in-and-outs of optimizing a color management workflow, showed where most print challenges occur and how to address them to avoid costly pitfalls.
