Vendor Views

John de la Roche explains how a partnership with South Cheshire College is stimulating wide-format interest and creativity among young designers.

With an array of Mimaki printers at its fingertips, distributor Hybrid Services is no stranger to demonstrating unusual and inspiring large-format digital print applications, but a desire to engage with designers and specifiers as well as potential future printers recently prompted a project that married the company with South Cheshire College. The end result turned Hybrid’s Mimaki showroom into an application showcase, having got young designers actively involved the process.

How the company is driving creativity and innovation in the interiors and fashion industries.

When MTEX burst onto the wide-format print scene three years ago it was with a view to presenting a direct-to-textile printer series that would meet the demands not only of the sign and display market, but which would also appeal to designers and creative professionals in the fashion, textiles and interiors

markets. 

“Education through inspiration” best describes the strategy adopted by flatbed printer manufacturer Inca Digital to promote the potential of UV inkjet to the creative professionals who are increasingly switching on to what the technology is capable of.

Starting just over a decade ago with the pioneering Eagle and Columbia models, a succession of Inca Digital printers - most recently, the Onset Series - have continued expanding the range of applications for flatbed UV inkjet technology. And every two years the Inca Digital Excellence Awards (Ideas) benchmark that progress by rewarding the creativity and ingenuity of Inca users around the world.

Rob Goleniowski, business manager, sign and graphics, Roland DG (UK), explains what the company is doing to promote wide-format print possibilities to creatives.

The creative and design sectors rely on raw inspiration and creativity as their engines for success and at Roland DG the corporate mission statement focuses on exactly that: “transforming imagination into reality”.

In this series of reports on what vendors are doing to help educate creative and other potential users of wide-format print we talk to Martin Johns, Market Development Manager, Prographics, Epson UK.

Promoting the many creative applications of digital large-format printing technology to creative and interior designers - as well as the general public - is a major element of Epson’s PR and marketing activities. The intention is not only to generate demand for digitally produced print but to inspire creatives to consider buying their own large-format print equipment.

Is Genesis founder Andrew Owen’s marketing know-how enabling him to push the envelope and put new wide-format print ideas in front of marketers?

While many printers are trying to evolve into ‘marketing service providers’, Cardiff-based Genesis Marketing is making that journey in reverse. Formed in 2005, Genesis is built on founder Andrew Owen’s marketing expertise, now reinforced with in-house wide-format capabilities thanks to a Roland VersaCamm VS540i print and cut machine.

In 2014 we'll be asking a number of vendors about what they’re doing to help educate possible would-be users of wide-format print about its potential. For this first report we put the question to Simon Addinall, market development manager EMEA, HP.

Print service providers have not been alone in facing the choices and challenges that rapid changesin printing technologies have brought - they have been felt along the entire length of the supply chain, from the brand managers, designers and marketers, to distribution companies.

Inaugural ‘Think Bigger Report’ this spring to explore and develop the relationship between ‘creatives’ and the wide- format print sector. Here Graham Leeson, head of European communications, graphic systems, Fujifilm Europe, explains why the company has got behind the project.