Ever since I saw the complexity and the stunning color of the new fabric-printed beachwear during my recent summer trips to the Eastern Shore, I have been a student of fabric printing. The advances in this technology are intriguing as well as beautiful.
While reading CIO magazine today, I was pleased to see an article on the commercial printing industry in this IT periodical. Actually, the article, entitled “Photo Finishes the Sale,” written by Mary K. Pratt and published in the May 1, 2014, issue of CIO, focuses more on mobile e-commerce than on custom printing. It describes technology that would allow a reader of a print catalog (or magazine) to point a camera phone at an ad (let's say an ad for clothing), invoke an image recognition application, and be sent immediately to a mobile purchasing site, making it unnecessary for the reader to visit the retailer's website.
My fiancee and I installed a standee for Rio 2 tonight in a local theater. As I inserted all 57 screws, I came to appreciate the intricacy of its diecutting, scoring, and pattern gluing. Actually, it was more than intricate. It was precise. Everything that had been scored could be folded correctly, and everything drilled with holes for screws went together perfectly, too, in the almost three-hour assembly.
In prior blog postings, I have written about a 450-page, 8.5” x 11” book I've been working on with a client of mine. My client and her boss have looked at a number of press runs (from 1,600 to 10,000 copies) and binding options (perfect binding and plastic coil binding). I have approached digital printers (with the new HP T230 web-fed inkjet press), sheetfed printers, and web offset printers.
At first glance, the concept of four-color black and white images would appear contradictory. After all, either you print halftone images in black ink only, or you print them in full color (i.e., cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink). Or do you?
My fiancee just bought an exceptionally cool print book on Pilates physical fitness (Pilates: achieving your potential for health, strength, flexibility, and stamina, by Joyce Gavin). It has a see-through cover that reveals a bright magenta photo underneath. The title is screen printed onto the binder in solid black ink, and the binding is a white, Wire-O coil looped through the plastic folder material.