Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Jobs from the past - Number 82

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 and here's one from 2011. 

Whistles Lookbook
Autumn Winter 2011
Between 2010 and 2013, many of the lookbooks produced by Whistles were printed on our papers and appeared on this blog, but I must have missed writing about this one! I'm sure you can see from the images below, it is a beautiful piece. Art direction, photography and reproduction is superb.
The size is 320x230mm portrait, saddle stitched. It is a 32pp self cover text on Marazion Ultra 90gsm, so the whole job has a deliberately 'floppy' feel.
Art Direction, design and production is by Simmonds. It just has a fantastic feel - it is difficult for me to say much more about it - just look at the images below, they speak for the job...
As with some of the previous Whistles lookbooks, many of the spreads alternate between CMYK in colour and four colour black and white images, and on some spreads there a completely blank pages which creates a luxurious feeling of space.
Click on images to enlarge
As I mentioned before, the Marazion Ultra 90gsm gives the book a deliberately floppy feel, the pages just turn over and flow beautifully.
 The book opens and sits nice and flat.
Art Direction and design is by Simmonds Ltd. Photography is by Kacper Kasprzyk and styling is by Francesca Burns. Print is by Push.
 
Posted by Justin Hobson 02.08.2016


Thursday, 28 July 2016

Holland Park Villas

Holland Park Villas is a residential development on a 2 acre site from in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This gated development, adjacent to Holland Park boasts 68 apartments with 4 penthouses. The development is a joint venture between Native Land, Grosvenor, Hotel Properties Limited and Amcorp.

This is the luxuriously appointed sales brochure for the development. Size is 240x210mm, portrait and is section sewn. It has an 8pp cover with a 28pp text which gives it a 3mm spine.
The 8pp cover is printed inside with a solid metallic gold pantone, as you can see from the pic below:
Click on images to enlarge
The brochure is printed on our Omnia range. The cover is on 320gsm and the text is on 150gsm. As you can see from the images, there is lots of colour and images with the dark interiors looking great on the Omnia, retaining detail in the dark areas. The solid metallic look just beautiful, flat, matt and tactile.
Click on images to enlarge
The brochure is printed offset litho in CMYK plus metallic gold throughout and as I'm sure you can see from the images, the reproduction is superb.
Design is by London based branding agency Identity, Design Director is Lisa Roser. Print is by Crucial Colour, who are based in Crowborough.

http://www.hollandparkvillas.com/
http://identity-design.co.uk/
http://www.crucialcolour.co.uk/
Posted by Justin Hobson 28.07.2016

Tuesday, 26 July 2016

Jimmy Choo AW 2016 Invitation

This is a very luxurious looking invitation to the launch of the Autumn/Winter collection for luxury fashion brand Jimmy Choo. The 4pp Invitation is 148x110mm, portrait and is made using our Flockage Colours 400gsm in Bordeaux. 
For those of you which are not familiar with this product, it is a flocked board which feels like a velvety cloth/material to the touch. It also takes hot foil blocking exceptionally well as the heat, softens the fibres allowing the foil to bed down nicely in the flock. 
Flockage is a one sided material - in the case of the Bordeaux, it has a coloured flock face and a Bordeaux coloured board reverse. For this project the board has been duplexed, bonding the two board faces together and creating an 800gsm board with flock on both sides - and most importantly, the edge is still a Bordeaux colour.
On the inside front cover of the invitation, a mirror is affixed, so you catch your thrilled reaction at having received the invitation! The gold tinted mirror is a piece of 3mm acrylic mounted onto the Flockage surface. The hot foil blocking is in a deep crimson shade.
As you will be able to see from the image below, the material has a twin parallel creased spine to allow for the thickness of the mirror, which works superbly. 
Art direction and design is by the 'in house' studio at Jimmy Choo and the designer on the project is Sinnie Chong. All aspects of production, including the duplexing, hot foil blocking and sourcing and mounting of the mirror was overseen by David Blakeman at Identity Print based in Paddock Wood - also worth pointing out that they are one of the few printers to have hot foil blocking 'in house'!
 
Posted by Justin Hobson 26.07.2016

Friday, 22 July 2016

Royal Ascot Festival Guide

188 Bet is an international betting website based in the Isle of Man. They cover sporting events and also offer casino, poker and bingo online. As an online company, they rarely commit to paper, but for the occasion of Royal Ascot, they produced this festival guide for their customers, which also included some exclusive offers.
The outer folder is hot foil blocked in metallic copper foil with the company logo and is printed on Colorset Natural 270gsm
...which folds out to a 6pp folder like so:
The middle panel has a tipped on page which is printed on the same material as the booklet. On the right hand side there is an open sided pocket, with logo shaped die cut, which holds the booklet in place. Here is the booklet out of the pocket:
The booklet is 140mm square, it has a 4pp cover on Colorset Natural 270gsm, which is hot foil blocked to match the folder.
Inside is a 16pp text which is printed on our Stardream, Crystal 120gsm. Stardream has a pearlescent finish, which when printed on makes the whole image pearlescent.
...hopefully you can just about see the reflective pearlescent effect on the below image:
The brochure was produced and printed by Herts and Essex printers who are based in Hertford. The text is actually digitally printed on their Nexpress - which interestingly can print up to a size of 340x905mm.

https://www.ascot.co.uk/Royal-Ascot
https://www.188bet.co.uk/en-gb/
chris@hertsessexprinters.com
Posted by Justin Hobson 22.07.2016

Tuesday, 19 July 2016

Sprayed Catalogue

Now this is going to be quite a long article, but as it's almost certainly the best piece of work that's appeared on this blog this year, I make no apologies....
 
This is the sublime catalogue produced to accompany last Summer's exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in London, called Sprayed. I wrote about the invitations, earlier this year.
This extensive exhibition spanning four generations explores the myriad ways in which artists have employed the impulsive yet de-personalized and non-gestural forces of spray. It begins with Paul Klee's work on paper Seltsames Theater (1929), where he improvised with a blowpipe to achieve hazy background effects in a circus scene. This tentative experiment presaged the bold and diverse artistic licence that would come with the post-war advent of aerosol paint as a consumer product and the use of the industrial paint compressor. (Gagosian)
Size of the catalogue is 295x250mm, portrait. It contains 232 pages in total and remarkably contains 16 different colours of our Colorset 120gsm, as text pages. 
Click on images to enlarge
The below image of the fore-edge of the catalogue gives you some idea of just how much colour is in the whole publication.
The majority of the artists work is printed on a Gloss coated paper, called Garda Gloss 170gsm, with the Colorset pages used for references, quotations and also for reproducing some images, as in the pic above, where the right hand page is printed on Colorset Natural.
 Below image showing Pantone 877U (Silver) printed on Colorset Nero 120gsm
Click on images to enlarge
To further complicate the collation and binding, there are a number of 'throw-outs' throughout the catalogue.
Click on images to enlarge
The below image shows the acknowledgements and publishers information - printed on Colorset Indigo (in Pantone silver 877U) and Colorset Ash120gsm
The exhibition features works from over fifty artists and is organised by Jona Lueddeckens and Greg Bergner. There are two essays: Conjugating Spray by John Corbett and Aerosol by Nicholas de Monchaux. The below image shows Aerosol, printed in Blue 072U.
The 8pp cover is also printed on our Colorset Nero 270gsm and was specifically ordered as a 'Short Grain' sheet so the grain direction is correct. The 'jacket' only appears on the front of the book and is affixed along the spine, wrapping around the cover with the flap tucking inside the front cover. The jacket is printed on Chorus Lux Silk 130gsm.
The pictures below attempt to show the way the jacket works...
The job is PUR bound, showing the colourful contents superbly:
Design is by Graphic Thought Facility in London. They regularly produce publications for the Gagosian and you can see many other superb catalogues on their website. I doubt I could do justice in attempting to explain the way in which GTF crafted this catalogue. I will however, just explain that to accomplish this masterpiece, they produced litho printed proofs on more than the 16 colours of paper they ended up using - proofs that were CMYK and also in four special colours - pictured below.
Of course it goes without saying that this result was only possible thanks to the relationship that GTF has with the printer of the project, Pureprint. To have met the exacting standards of reproduction for the gallery and each of the artists involved plus producing over half the book on a multiple of different coloured papers is really quite some achievement. The whole project was printed Offset Litho in CMYK and, according to my notes ...seven special colours!

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/sprayed--june-11-2015
http://www.graphicthoughtfacility.com/
http://www.pureprint.com/
Posted by Justin Hobson 19.07.2016