Wide-format Blogs

As I suppose you would expect following a show-laden spring, we’re seeing a splurge of new wide-format installations across a wide-spectrum of print businesses. Great news for the kit manufacturers and suppliers – but how’s the spread of digital wide-format affecting those of you who have been involved since the early days. Are you leaving the new players to the more basic stuff and focussing your efforts on the more specialised products/markets where your know-how should still give you the edge? Or are you finding that they are coming in with the new ideas and you are continuing to operate in the markets you’ve always served?

Even if the various open air concerts planned for throughout the UK end up being a wash-out for the participants and party-goers this summer, hopefully they will have proved to be a little ray of sunshine for the printers providing the stage and set graphics! If you’ve been involved and have printable quality pictures to prove it, please let me have them along with a couple of lines about the job – perhaps we’ll be able to produce a party themed ‘In-Situ’ gallery of work in the printed issue of Image Reports.

Josero’s MD says the company is seeing sales of refurbished superwide printers soar in the current economic climate, with print companies looking for a cheaper way to diversify. If you are one of those that have done exactly that and are happy to talk about the ROI on your investment please get in touch – I’ll look forward to hearing how the decision has impacted your business development strategy.

Substrates, and their creative specification, play a significant role in a wide-format sector where a novel print product - or at least one produced on an unusual media - can win you business. Hence the explosion of new substrates across the market in the last couple of years. But how keenly do the substrates manufacturers listen to the grass roots print community when it comes to product development? Do you have a particularly strong relationship with a company when it comes to media R&D? If so, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

How are you finding it to borrow from the bank? If you have recently had your proposals rejected - appeal. It’s worth it according to figures just emerging since a new appeals process began in April 2011. In response the Forum of Private Business is urging medium and small businesses to use the system where they feel their application for funding has been unjustly rejected by the bank.

Cowardly consultants

Scott Berkun is a guru, an author of three business bestsellers (most notably ‘Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds’) but he is brave and generous enough on his website (www.scottberkun. com) to help companies assess the consultants and gurus who promise to transform businesses.

His bullshit detecting method is simple. Berkun says just ask the advisers some straightforward questions. Have you done this yourself? How do you know what you know? When does the theory you are advocating not apply? And when did you last make a mistake and why? As Berkun says: “If they’re so smart and they’ve never failed, it means they are a coward.”

IT, Google and UK plc

This April, Prism Total IT Solutions began delivering cheap, basic computers into British schools in an initiative which company co-founder Gary David Smith believes will help ameliorate the government’s failure to make basic computer literacy and coding part of the national curriculum. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, visited the UK last year, he said: “I was flabbergasted to learn that computer science isn’t even taught as a standard in UK schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on software but gives no insight into how it’s made. That is just throwing away your great computer heritage.” With a 57% drop in UK students gaining IT qualifications between 2005 and 2010, Smith and Schmidt may have a point.

Award winners aren’t always trailblazers but it’s hard not to be impressed by the meticulousness of New Jersey printer Sandy Clifton’s environmental programme. The company has just won an award from America’s Sustainable Green Printing Partnership after designing a new wide-format facility to be as environmentally friendly as possible and reconfiguring an existing wide-format area to use less energy.

On the company website (www.sandyinc.com), the company says clearly: “Every decision we make – from the choice of ink and paper to the handling of printed waste has implications for the environment.” The rhetoric is reinforced by an impressive depth of detail, revealing its strategy to achieve carbon neutrality, its preference for wind power (the annual environmental benefit that accrues from this policy is, it says, is equivalent to planting over 9,000 acres of trees) and even where the company feels it still has scope to do better.

It seems harsh to cavil but the one area it could do better is timeliness: the last sustainability report on its website covers 2009. But in almost every other respect, Sandy Clifton offers a model of best practice.

The New Jersey printer’s efforts have been matched by Oregon printer Portland Press (www.premierpress.com), another SGP award winner. The printing firm already stands out because it is owned and run by three sisters – Jodi, Juli and Joni – who “grew up with ink in their blood” because the company was founded in 1974 by their parents Diane and Arnold Wheeler. Portland relies entirely on wind energy and buys carbonless offsets to achieve a carbonless footprint. In their efforts to become greener, management have considered everything from motion sensor lighting in warehouses to Baldwin blanket wash technology which reduces wash-up VOCs by 95%. The company modestly says: “Our goal is to be a forerunner in the battle for true sustainability”.

We have news that Bex Design will be celebrating its silver anniversary as well as the Diamond Jubilee this weekend by getting into the charitable mode. Will your company be doing anything to mark the royal occasion? Or indeed, have you printed anything relating to it. If so, please drop me a line or two and a picture. Enjoy the sun – I’ve heard we’re all going to have some!

Do you have a strong sustainability message? If you think you do please get in touch as I’m eager to talk to wide-format print companies with a CRS strategy that goes beyond printing on ‘eco-friendly’ materials and waste management. I look forward to hearing from you.

Oh to be perusing gorgeous photography by the seaside! While thoughts of the large-format printed sea creature images at the Baltic ‘horizonte Zingst’ photography festival have me daydreaming, the work also highlights the realities of what can now be achieved that would have been impossible until very recently. As the horizons continue to expand for large-format inkjet, keep me abreast of your ventures into new waters.

Drupa is no sooner finished than we all need to start thinking about autumn events! It will be interesting to see how new shows like Cross Media and EcoPrint fare in this busy show year. Given that they are unlike anything that has gone before they should stimulate interest among that part of the print community that understands the need to look beyond the normal parameters of business. I’ll be at both so let me know if you will be. I’d be interested in hearing your reasons.