PRIDE IN PRINT

There’s definitely a seasonal feel to the print that we feel has this month displayed the elements needed to show how print can be a powerful medium and one that printers can take justifiable pride in.

The first ties in very much with the pride that Mancunians feel for one of their football teams, Manchester City, not Stockport or United. Whether or not building sized images of Shaun Wright-Phillips made any difference to the victory over Chelsea, the club is definitely winning when it comes to marketing.

At the other end of the world, almost literally, is Country Life, using its cover to bring to readers an advent calendar that for many would ensure that the publication endured throughout December. And then because the Christmas season is one where charity is to the fore, we spotlight two charity jobs. The first for Macmillan Cancer Support uses different print techniques to help its supporters raise more money for the charity, while the second is the programme for the Royal Variety Performance. In any year this is a high profile job, made more interesting this time because the even was staged in Blackpool where the town’s famous illuminations inspired an inspiration piece of design and print.


A clean pair of heels
Manchester City supporters have been gee’ed up all season about their club’s prospects and print is playing its part in creating the conversations. The biggest examples so far of this were four giant poster treatments of winger Shaun Wright-Phillips ahead of the Chelsea match. The choice of the ex-Chelsea player facing his former club, was deliberate and follows posters of Carlos Tevez and Emanuel Adebayor earlier in the year. Each has had a different style of presentation. With Wright-Phillips, the idea has been to stress his pace, so the player is featured running from billboard to billboard, around buildings and even up The Printworks, the former newspaper plant that is now an entertainment centre. The eye-catching mammoth prints were the work of design agency Music and were produced in Wolverhampton by Digital-IS using a new brick vinyl and printing on its Vutek 3600. The vinyl is positioned on the wall and heated so that it melts into the brickwork to give a painted effect. “We do quite a bit of work for Manchester City’s agency so that they know we are up for a challenge,” says Robb Gilligan from Digital IS. “This is a new material which as far as we know has never been used at this size before.” Quite how much of a challenge had been set became apparent at The Printworks where the vinyl panels had to be positioned 60ft up in the air on a rainy, windy day. Starting on Sunday, the job took two days to complete. “The feedback has been incredible,” Gilligan adds. “The fans websites have called the posters ‘awesome and incredible’. Even when we were putting it up there were people asking us about it. I took to carrying a sample of the vinyl to explain what we were doing. That sort of feedback has really motivated everyone at the company.

”Now Gilligan and the team are looking for other applications for the brick vinyl. “It has so much potential used with the right design and the right applications. And there’s the Olympics coming up . . .”


Advent heralds creative cover
Country Life has again produced a special cover for its Christmas issue, choosing to turn its cover into an advent calendar. The IPC Media title produced an advent calendar for the first time in 2007 and the issue, released at the end of November, is becoming a seasonal fixture – at least this is what the publisher hopes. Editor Mark Hughes says: “We had fantastic feedback on our first ever advent calendar cover and it quickly became an issue we – and our readers – look forward to each year. Innovation is hugely important, particularly for a weekly magazine, and we’re delighted to have Royal Mail on board this year to provide us with a beautiful timeline of images in the countdown to Christmas.”

None of it would have been possible without the assistance of the printer however. While the main body of the magazine was printed by Polestar Chantry as normal, the cover was produced separately by Wyndeham Impact. The Basingstoke printer is a specialist cover printer and is set up to manage unconventional jobs that are designed to achieve maximum on shelf impact. Wyndeham Impact sales director John Crouch says: “IPC has been a long established client of Wyndeham Impact for many years. We were delighted once again to be asked to produce this special festive cover for Country Life and IPC are very happy with the finished product.”

The printer ran the job on its Heidelberg Goss M600 16pp press which has six units and inline uv varnishing. The press has a sheeted and the covers were palleted up for die cutting and gluing externally, but to Wyndeham Impact’s quality guidelines. It was then shipped to Polestar for binding around the rest of the magazine.

The artwork featured a seasonal image of a toyshop in the Edwardian age and behind the doors a parade of Royal Mail’s Christmas stamps through the ages.
Ideas for fund raisers


Ideas for fund raisers
The Christmas period is inextricably linked with charity, typified by cards and calendars produced in their thousands. Cancer support charity Macmillan went a step further with The Little Green Book of Fundraising Ideas, a guide stuffed full of ways to bring in much needed revenue. So good was the book that it won The Third Sector category in this year’s Marketing Design Awards.

And that was down to the print production, involving paper supplied by PaperCo and print production organised by GI Solutions, Leicester. The paper used was various weights of 9Lives Offset, which has become the charity’s house stock following consultations with WRAP. PaperCo has chosen Macmillan as its preferred charity, pledging to raise enough money to fund one of the Macmillan nurses for 100 days.

Anthony Rathbone, production and logistics manager for Macmillan, says: “9Lives bulk allows us to produce items with a substantial feel, without having to increase our grammage, keeping our costs down. It’s 100% recycled and FSC accredited and it complements Macmillan’s visual identity brilliantly. Its whiteness shows off our bold green silhouettes and unique typeface and adds to how instantly recognisable our publications have become.”

The 15,000 run 94pp perfect bound book used 140gsm, 170gsm and 250gsm papers. As well as straightforward pages, the 101 fundraising ideas in the book called for it to include raffle tickets, Christmas cracker gags, sticker sheets and a punch out masquerade mask.

GI Solutions is Macmillan’s regular supplier of print services but had to go outside the group for the sheetfed printing and binding services that are not offered by sister company GI Direct. Account handler Alyson Brooke says: “We placed the job with trusted partners equipped with a B1 Speedmaster and Cutstar, which bound the printed label sheets, into the book. Everyone was delighted with the results.”


When the lights go down
When The Royal Variety Performance moved to Blackpool this year, it provided design agency elliotyoung with the chance to create the event’s prestigious programme to incorporate the town’s landmark tower and famous illuminations. And the tower itself is picked out in a rainbow holographic foil on the cover.

The Bedford design firm has produced the programme and the other collateral for the night, menus, place cards and so on five previous occasions so is used to the last minute changes of line up that are made as artistes become available or drop out at the last moment. Further along the line this creates challenges for printer John Good, Coventry, which has an even longer association with the high profile charity event.

“We get the final files on a Monday, print, then fold on Tuesday, to the binders on Wednesday, dispatch to the venue on Thursday ready for the performance on Friday night,” explains Production Director Savi Chaggar.

The printer specialises in theatrical work and has to manoeuvre space for the job among the thousands of pantomine programmes that are printed at this time of year. But it has produced the Royal Variety Performance programme for more almost 20 years. “It has never been the same, the designers are always looking for something new,” he says.

The evening is a charity event raising money for the Entertainment Artistes Benevolent Fund. Consequently many suppliers provide services to allow quality to exceed what might otherwise be possible. McNaughton supplied the 100% recycled Cocoon paper that was used, the first time that a completely recycled material had been chosen, while Celloglas provided the foiling on the cover and Coventry Binders was used to finish the programme.

Elliotyoung creative director Dan Elliot says: “It is always more exciting when the event leaves London, it lets us focus on creating something special for the audience and for the Fund. We focused on the Blackpool Illuminations as the real inspiration for bringing the brochure to life. The cover was the result of a lot of hard work in creating a link between the iconic Blackpool Tower and the heritage of the event with a series of elegant and heraldic shapes.

“Because of the help from suppliers we can employ specialist finishes we wouldn’t normally be able to afford and because it’s a charity we want to maximise the money raised for them.”