Panettone Wrap

This is a lovely project which was produced last year at Christmas time. I received a call from Richard Davey at London based printer Leycol, who asked if we could supply a 60gsm in a red and black paper. We discussed the project further and it turned out that paper was to be printed with a metallic gold text and sent to Italy to wrap the traditional Panettone cake for sale in the Wildwood Deli.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a readily available red/black 60gsm stock paper available from one of our supplying mills and the quantity wasn't enough for a 'mill making',  so I suggested that he could successfully print a solid colour onto our Offenbach Bible 60gsm and the metallic gold text with excellent results. I sent Richard a printed sample of a McQ project to show how well a solid could work.  

The sheets were printed on a B1 Heidelberg offset litho press, in a solid pantone (not panettone colours!) colour plus a metallic gold and as you can see, the paper has printed beautifully. The size of the finished sheets are 550x750mm.

Not only does Offenbach Bible print beautifully, it also is very strong and "scrunches" beatifully! making it ideal for this type of wrapping, where a tissue paper (which you wouldn't be able to Litho Print) would actiually not be strong enough ...and here is the finished packaged article

Couldn't resist trying a slice!

Thanks to Richard Davey for giving us the opportunity to be involved with this very tasty project!

http://www.leycol.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 18.12.2018

Warner Edwards Garden

This garden at the Chelsea Flower show is inspired by Falls Farm, Northamptonshire, where every bottle of Warner Edwards Gin is distilled. The farm is situated on the remains of medieval terraced gardens, now a beautiful stepped grass landscape, which is represented discretely in the Warner Edwards Garden’s topography. Bee-friendly plants reflect the farm’s apiary, and thyme and lemon balm, which are highly aromatic, can be used in garnishing gin and tonic.

 

This booklet explains all about the garden, the designers, the layout and the plants which are used. It is printed offset litho in CMYK throughout with hot foil blocking on the cover.

The 4pp cover is printed on Flora Tabacco 240gsm and the 12pp text is on Flora Noce 130gsm. As you can see from the image below, the Noce is a slightly lighter shade than the Tabacco used for the cover.

The size of the booklet is 148x105mm, portrait and is singer sewn with green thread.

Click on images to enlarge

Above shows the centre spread with the singer sewing in the spine and below you can see the outside spine. A superb piece of sewing...

Flora, is a part recycled text and cover paper with a deliberately recycled look and feel with specks and inclusions, so it looks deliberately flecky and specky. Flora is produced with 30% post consumer de-inked waste, together with 60% of virgin FSC pulp 10% cotton fibres, which gives the paper a wonderful tactile feel. See the image below to see the detail...

Click on images to enlarge

Design is by London based agency Hue & Cry. Designer on the project is Kate McPartland. Print is by Leycol.

https://www.warneredwards.com/
http://www.huecryagency.com/

http://www.leycol.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 08.10.2018

Jobs from the past - Number 97

Regular followers of this blog will know that my first post of every month is a "job from the past" so that I can show some of the really good work from years gone by...

Design for Life - DixonBaxi 2004
DixonBaxi is the studio established by Simon Dixon and Aporva Baxi in 2001. Having both worked at Attik, they set up their new studio as a partnership, to be just the two of them, working without the trappings of a large agency. Throughout the 2000's, they consistently delivered exciting and innovative design, art direction and branding, predominately for television. Their work for MTV, SciFi Channel, Five and Formula One was high profile and lauded within the industry.

Rather than produce big flashy studio brochure, the two partners deliberately produced a modest portfolio piece to show the work that they had recently produced for clients with a title reflecting their philosophy: design for life

The size is A6 (105x148mm) landscape and is perfect bound with a lovely, neat, square 4mm spine. The cover is printed on StarFine 200gsm, printed in the bright magenta.

The text is made up using "French-folded" sections on Offenbach Bible 50gsm which gives it a sensational light feel and flows beautifully in the hand. 'French Folding' is where the folded edges are on the fore-edge of the book, as in the picture below:

Of course 'french - folding' uses more paper - in fact double the amount! - so this job is actually in conventional terms a 64pp text, which is actually 32x 4pp French folded sections, so in actuality its 128pp! ...but of course it's on 50gsm, so it's only a 4mm spine.

The spreads are sublime, the information pages printed in solid magenta and the project with images from their projects over the previous three years...

Bearing in mind much of the imagery used is from RGB screen grabs, the reproduction is really good, below is the work for MTV...

...and on an introduction spread, no words or image at all - just magenta space!

...you can see the way the text pages rolling and flopping over, flowing superbly.

It was printed offset litho by FS Moore in London and they really made a superb job of it. Richard Davey handled the project and he is now Sales Director at DG3/Leycol.

Design is, of course, by DixonBaxi. Simon and Aporva absolutely loved the finished piece and Simon was kind enough to send me file copies and a handwritten note...

DixonBaxi are now a much larger agency with 30 staff, still headed by Simon and Aporva, so sadly as is the way with bigger studios I no longer have regular contact with the two founders but it's great to have played a small part in the studio's development and history.

http://dixonbaxi.com/
http://www.leycol.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 02.11.2017

My Africa

This book called 'My Africa' is published by The Mo Ibrahim Foundation in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the charity. The book is a result of a competition run by the foundation where entries were submitted from all over the African continent from professional photographers, amateurs and students.

The charity was founded in 2006 with a focus on the critical importance of leadership and governance in Africa and was founded by Dr. Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese philanthropist and businessman. As Mr Ibrahim says in the introduction "We were determined not to produce yet another impressive coffee table book, with beautiful pictures of Africa - there are already so many of these. Instead we wanted to see our continent and our future, through the eyes of our fellow citizens"

The end result is a superbly produced piece of print designed by

Maria Tsirodimitri and overseen by Pentagram in London.

The book is 275x230mm, portrait with a 27mm spine. It is casebound with a mid grey book-cloth over the cover. There is a two thirds height matt laminated 'dustjacket' around the cover.

Introduction pages....

The 192pp text of the book is printed on our Shiro Echo, White 160gsm. This paper is made from 100% recycled fibres and also has FSC Mix certification, made by Favini in Italy.

Click on images to enlarge
 

The paper is a neutral white shade which is perfect both because books really should not be bright white (high whites are great for advertising but not relaxing to look at and read) and the paper works very sympathetically with the images. 

It is not possible to truly demonstrate the quality of the images (which, don't forget, are from professionals, amateurs and students - and all Africans) but I also can't do justice to the quality of the printing, which is absolutely superb. I hope the image above and the detail image below demonstrates a little of what I mean.

Image by Marco Silva (Cabo Verde)

I would like to suggest that you follow this link where you can see all the images, which will look a lot better than what I can show here: http://mo.ibrahim.foundation/my-africa/

 

There are four sections in the book, each separated with a solid colour spread of which this is one. Superb printing of a solid made out of CMYK.

This also happen to be the middle of the sewn section, so you can see the thread running neatly down the spine...

Image showing the 27mm spine with the sections and the ribbon marker.

This book has really succeeded in being a 'coffee table book' however it's been achieved with content supplied by ordinary people, thoughtful design and exemplary print and binding - not just another glossy book about Africa, so I think Dr Ibrahim's aims has been achieved.

Design is by Maria Tsirodimitri. Pentagram in London oversaw the project (Domenic Lippa's team). The superb printing is by Leycol in London with Richard Davey handling the print.

http://mo.ibrahim.foundation/my-africa/
http://mo.ibrahim.foundation/
https://www.behance.net/mariatsirodimitri
http://www.pentagram.com/
http://www.leycol.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 06.07.2017

Hawkins Brown

This is the brochure for Hawkins Brown, an internationally-renowned award winning practice of over 200 architects, interior designers, urban designers and researchers. Design is by Shoreditch based studio, Huddle.

The size of the publication is 310x230mm, portrait and is saddle stitched. It has a 4pp cover on 280gsm and a 28pp text on 120gsm, all printed on our Omnia. As you can see from the image above, it looks like there are four separate brochures, however they are all the same brochure, just featuring different covers ...and this is what Huddle say about the covers:
"The covers of the new practice brochures break with convention by featuring ‘abstract’ close-ups of structural elements of Hawkins\Brown projects, reflecting how the practice does things differently. And because each brochure’s colour picks up on a colour from its image, the secondary colour palette is in effect infinite, yet is a flexible, coherent and distinctive asset for the practice."

Click on images to enlarge

As you can see from the above images above and below, inside there are lots of colour images and solids throughout - and it just looks (and feels!) just beautiful on the Omnia - no mottle - just gorgeously even, solid areas. The four colour images look amazingly detailed and vibrant.

Click on images to enlarge

Of course, the solid colours used on the front covers, wrap around to the back cover giving a satisfying display of rich tones.

You can read more about this project on this link here.

Creative Director is Louise Desborough. Lead designer on the project is Tom Ward, together with Mike Bone and the account handler is Nicole Posner. The superlative print is by Leycol handled by Richard Davey.

https://www.hawkinsbrown.com/

http://www.huddlecreative.com/

http://www.leycol.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 27.04.2017