On 25 February, a day after the Print Summit 2012, the editorial team from PrintWeek India organised a digital print yatra in Mumbai. This included print firms like: Pods, Inndus and SRK Creatives among others. The aim was: the young team from Rickshaw, a young creative agency gets an opportunity to understand the complexities involved in producing a printed product right from ideation to fulfillment.

Pods (Andheri east)

Sunil Chuggani of Pods demystified the processing stages which a PDF file goes through before it is sent to the press for printing. He highlighted the precautions that need to be undertaken at the designing stage during the creation of a PDF file.

When asked by Mahua Hazarika of Rickshaw on how would the designer know if he has taken the necessary precautions, Chuggani demonstrated the levels of auto-check functions in designing softwares like Adobe product range and CorelDraw. He explained the mechanisms of multiple impositions for a digital printing job. Be it: product catalogue, brochure or business cards.

Chuggani explained that the imposition of the PDF files varies as per the requirement – be it: centre pinning or perfect binding. The impositions were demonstrated on the workflow software connected to the Kodak Nexpress S3000, the first to be installed in India.

The Rickshaw team’s curiosity about how the PDF file is made print-ready was answered through a live demo of the RIPping process whereby the PDF file was converted into a language the press understands.

Later, the team had a chance to see a range of print applications produced at Pods, from photo albums to corporate gifts, to brochures, to digitally printed books. The Rickshaw team had a tactile experience of paper textures – and how the end-user would perceive a product.

Inndus (Goregaon east)

The next stop was at the all-round digital service provider Inndus. Shailesh Sharma of Inndus appealed to the designers to work in tandem with the production team. He elaborated the fact that the communication between the designer and the production team can lead to better conversion of creative ideas into print. This way the production person collaborates and is “part and parcel of the idea” rather than being a DTP operator who checks the files and tweaks it. The set-up at Inndus consists of a  Xerox iGen3, an HP Designjet wide-format printer, a Konica Minolta mid-production press and a range of finishing kit.

Sharma focussed on the job requirement of his corporate clients and the check-list he follows to deliver the job. He explained the concept of variable data printing and personalisation with the help of print applications like certificates and calendars. The team at Inndus presented a technical demo on the digital press. Technicalities were decoded through easy-to-understand pointers.

The Rickshaw team got a feel of how the paper was traced from the feeding tray to the output. The wide-format section at Inndus was a revelation for the team Rickshaw as they got to explore the substrates apart from vinyl and flex on which branding can be displayed. This included substrates like sun-board, canvass, acrylic, cloth and flooring tiles.

The Rickshaw team, which assumed that a rigid wide-format structure could only be rendered through pasting of flex and vinyl on a fabricated structure, decided to deploy a sun-board application which they saw was being printed on the flatbed of the wide-format machine.

SRK Creatives (Borivali east)
The final stop was the headquarters of SRK Creatives. With 40 outlets all across Mumbai, the headquarters houses the HP Indigo 5500 to service its business of designing and printing wedding albums.

Pradeep Shah who oversees marketing at SRK said the trend towards photo books and albums is a big shift in the photographic market. This allows users to create theme books and albums and print customised copies.

Shah demonstrated a range of wedding albums produced on eight substrates with innovative techniques. This included: pasting of a lens on the final product or the lay-flat design. The team got acquainted with printing on metallic sheets to get the effect of silver and gold plus step creasing for photos with UV treatment, and window cutting technique for thermal and BOPP.

For album jackets, SRK designs and creates leather pads, digital pads and handmade pads. The size of a SRK album ranges from 8in x 12in to 20in x 40in for a centre-creasing album where photos are creased at the centre and the final output is half the size of the image.

The SRK’s three-storey building has a 32-member designing unit, each with a desktop powered by software for processing intensive image editing tools. Shah emphasised how each sheet of paper is calibrated before it is printed. “We got to know that it’s because of calibrations that a print on photographic paper becomes comparable to the quality of a traditionally developed photograph,” concluded Hazarika of Rickshaw.

 

In addition to the digital print yatra, there were two other routes:

Route one included: New Jack in Goregaon (East), Mail Order Solutions in Malad (West), Parksons Graphics in Andheri (West).

Route two included: Prodon in Lower Parel, Jak Printers in Byculla, Sahaya Print Services in Lower Parel and Indigo Press in Byculla (East).

The sixth edition of the Print Summit 2012 was organised by Bombay Master Printers Association (BMPA) on 23-24 February 2012 in Mumbai at the NCPA theatre.

Click here to view glimpses of the print