The 2018 FLEXO Magazine Cover Project Used Design & Software to Push Flexography Past Offset & Gravure

FLEXO Magazine July 2018 coverDesign is subjective. Each of us has an internal list of traits, features and attributes which we find appealing, and another list just as long of variations which we find unappealing. We begin assembling those lists as soon as we begin to recognize objects; many of those preferences are honed in the stages of our lives where we sculpt our personalities, tied to strong memories and, when questioned, provoke a firm and forceful defense, while others are fancies chosen on a whim and swayed just as easily.

And they are all unique: For every individual whose favorite color is green, there is one who finds it unsightly. Show two people Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting, “Guernica,” and one may be moved to tears by its depiction of war’s atrocities while another is puzzled by its seemingly random collection of shouting heads, random shapes and abstractly configured animal heads. Tell someone the iPhone X is the most beautiful smartphone ever made and you are as likely to be agreed with as you are to be told the “notch” on the top of its screen is an unforgivable sin.

But as open to debate as design is, execution—taking a design and making it real—is objective, matter of fact, removed from dispute. Picasso’s ability to paint, sculpt and create art—his skill—is above reproach. Apple produces millions of its $1,000 iPhone and each is identical to the others and to the product seen in advertisements. And we can all agree when something is or is not “green.”

This distinction is crucial because, after all the market studying, demographic targeting, focus grouping, A/B testing, tweaking and adjusting, whatever design is settled upon, it has to be made. And at that point, everyone involved—designers, printers, brand owners—is in agreement: They want spectators—specifically consumers—to stop and stare in amazement.

“We want people to look, we want their jaws to drop and their mouths to open in disbelief,” explains Danielle Kinsella, marketing director at FTA member Hamillroad Software Ltd and the designer behind the 2018 FLEXO Magazine Cover Project. With her company’s 2018 FTA Technical Innovation Award-winning software, Bellissima Digitally Modulated Screening (DMS), she and the project’s partners aimed to astonish twice: First, using crisp highlight dots, fades to zero and the “stochastic rosette” to create a flexographically printed cover at a previously unseen level of quality, and again when flipping the page to compare it to an offset version of the same image.

The results speak for themselves, but there is still plenty to say about what went into the project.

Catapult Print’s Ash Cook measures color density on the cover with a spectrophotometer. “Consumers are more permissive than ever when it comes to food shopping, potentially visiting several stores in a single week, meaning print and packaging are playing an even bigger role in decision making,” he says. “As a result, standing out on shelf can never be compromised by a poor print finish.”

A Design That’s En Vogue

The typical FLEXO Magazine cover sits firmly in the wheelhouse of flexography and ties to the articles contained inside. June 2018’s ink, anilox roll and doctor blade guide featured an ink plume on page one. A press-focused issue might have massive machinery adorning the cover—at times a central impression (CI) unit and at other times inline or hybrid.

The July issue—always focused on prepress—may feature plates, processors or calibration devices, but it is also a chance to think outside the box. July 2017’s installment contained an assortment of design-oriented images meant to evoke “the history and growth of prepress,” as described by its creators at FTA member Trisoft Graphics Inc. For 2018, Danielle says she looked to an industry known for its stop-and-stare designs.

“The thought behind the cover was to create a design which mimicked Vogue; a Vogue-esque cover with a powerful image of a striking model,” she says. “I wanted the design to be eye-catching but also link back to the printing and packaging industry, hence the reflection in the model’s sunglasses of a supermarket or grocery store aisle.”

The connection to Vogue and fashion was more than skin deep, however. The high-end clothing world has publications of a similar quality—designers want to show off their products as best they can, advertisers want their products to look fantastic in print, and magazines want to ensure the editorial and photos are as true to life as possible, and the same is true for the brands and retailers with their products on store shelves. Further, the products shown in those magazines, whether fresh off the runway or from next season’s collection, are always forward-facing—“They are current but also push the boundaries of what fashion means.” In the same way, the cover image aims to catch the reader’s attention, “but then I want them to also think about what is possible because of the technology Bellissima DMS brings to the flexo market.”

It brings quality for flexo printers to a whole new level. It’s been very exciting to me because it gives them the ability to compete with other markets—mainly offset, gravure and digital—where some jobs that would have been challenging to print flexo are not as challenging anymore.

Joe Settanni, national business development director at Apex International

Danielle explains how some of the cover’s individual elements were chosen to accentuate those possibilities:

  • Expanded gamut (EG) is highlighted in several areas. The model’s lipstick, originally red, was changed to a rainbow effect. That also shows up in the footer text at the bottom of the cover. “On the reverse of the flexo print, we used that same rainbow strip to showcase the key benefits—fade to zero, image quality redefined and fixed palette/EG”
  • Less apparent, EG is put to use in the FLEXO masthead: “We have taken a bold red as used by a popular drinks company and shown how you can create smooth and flat tints, avoiding the need for costly spot colors”
  • Fruit, popcorn and chocolate may be enjoyable when eaten, but flexographers like them much less when they need to be printed. “Popcorn is quite difficult to print conventionally,” but Bellissima DMS’ highlight dots enable subtle, light detail; “chocolate is another difficult image, often needing the use of a spot color to get the dark rich browns required to make it look realistic” but ably handed by four colors and Hamillroad’s software
“This breaks all the rules,” says Catapult Print’s CEO Mark Cook of the 2018 FLEXO Magazine Cover Project.

Occupying the majority of the cover, the sunglasses-clad model and her skin are what Danielle says would have displayed visible rosettes and possibly moiré had the underlying dots been created with another screening method. Through the use of the “stochastic rosette,” Hamillroad Software Ltd’s CEO and Managing Director Andy Cave notes that “no two adjacent dots in any one color will fully overlap any two adjacent dots in another color. As you can imagine, this is immense, as it does not just eliminate color shifts, but also reduces noise in flat tints which are made up of more than one color component.”

The opportunity to use design elements not previously seen as favorable to flexography—and the prospect of stealing market share from offset and gravure—is exciting, but it does require a retraining of the brain, particularly the brains in the prepress department and on the pressroom floor.

“You may have to completely ‘re-think’ how you currently approach flexographic printing,” Danielle cautions. “To say you have to ‘re-think’ initially appears to be a negative, but it’s not. Anything goes—It’s about shaking up the old perceptions around what can and cannot be done and instead think: ‘I have here a blank canvas—Let’s create!’”