Award winning print and marketing solutions

If you are at Drupa today, don’t miss the HP Eco Leadership Forum taking place at the HP tent at 15:45. Focusing on improving performance, Pureprint director Richard Owers will join other sustainability leaders to discuss how the printing industry can move forward on key environmental issues. Digital Printing is currently the biggest growth area in print because of its ability to communicate personalised messages and reduce both waste and costs.

Pureprint will be talking about how they are adding value to various web to print projects including a personalised prospectus system for the University of Portsmouth while at the same time reducing environmental impact by producing less but more targeted pages. Watch the relevant video on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5yZFMxQt3s&feature=plcp and register your attendance to the forum on https://h30599.www3.hp.com/us/en/schedule?jumpid=ex_R10931_go/drupa/socialmedia

Pureprint has appointed James Parker as chief technical officer to help the company grow its cross-media business and extend its range of marketing services.

Pureprint appoints James Parker as chief technical officer

Parker has more than 15 years’ print-based technology experience, having started as a data programmer at St Ives Direct, before founding his own data management company and then joining Intelligent Print Solutions, which was later bought by Charterhouse Print Management. He then joined Dialogue Solutions, now part of the Lateral Group, as group software development director, where he led a 25-strong team and was a member of the board.

His role will include improving workflow efficiencies and optimising job turnarounds, in addition to expanding the company’s range of marketing services beyond traditional print.

Parker said: “My strength lies in solving problems though technology and I am delighted to have joined Pureprint at this exciting time.”

One of Parker’s first tasks is to achieve the ISO 27001 standard for an Information Security Management System.

“ISO 27001 is all about adopting a methodical approach in managing confidential or sensitive information across all processes and IT systems within our business. This will allow us to diversify our service further,” Parker added.

Pureprint chief executive Mark Handford said: “We are extending the business to provide a comprehensive marketing service that makes a tangible difference to our customers. James’s role will be paramount in this process and I am confident that his knowledge, experience and skills will be a great asset to our business.”

We believe print is an exciting, vibrant and innovative industry so we were over the moon when a group of gifted children from local primary schools expressed an interest in visiting our factory. This group of Junior Journalist’s was set up last year by the deputy heads of 4 local schools to encourage these talented children to work together on a number of interesting projects.

This year the children are putting together a local news magazine and were keen to learn more about magazine print production.

We were delighted to take the children on a tour of the factory and explain the process of printing and how it has progressed over recent years from an analogue and largely manual process to a fully automated digital one. When showing them around the HP Indigo 7500′s, one of the highlights was no doubt as we opened up the side of the machine to show off the inner workings. “Whoa!” they all cheered, we distinctly got the impression that they felt it was like something out of Transformers.

The serious bit of the day apart from showing how the print industry worked was to make a little dent in dispelling the myth that print is “bad” for the environment. The children were impressed to find out that Pureprint are the first company in the UK to have graduated from the WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Network, meaning that over 95% of our paper is sourced from FSC certified forests. They were also fascinated to discover that the forests in Europe have grown by 30% since 1950 partly as a result of environmentally conscious printers such as Pureprint who became the first carbon neutral printer in the world in 2002.

The children left the visit with a photo board to commemorate their trip and with plenty of ideas and enthusiasm to continue their magazine publishing journey.

Towards the end of last year we were approached by Stewdio “an art practice, a code house and a graphic design studio” to produce a really exciting project. They needed us to print off 30,000 slips of paper, roughly business card size, each one containing a completely unique phrase on it. Our expertise and experience in running variable data projects on our HP Indigo’s enabled the project to run smoothly but the context wasn’t entirely clear to us until we saw the display appear in Selfridges’ window accompanied with the blogs produced by It’s Nice That http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/its-nice-that-words-words-words-at-selfridges and Stewdio http://stewd.io/w/wordacoaster

It turns out It’s Nice That had been tasked with promoting Selfridges’ “Words, Words, Words” initiative designed to promote slow communication and celebrate the inspirational and creative power of words and literature. How delightful that a printed product was still considered the best way to encapsulate this.

Stewdio created a custom in-browser Javascript which hopped around Wiktionary collecting thousands of adjectives which were then converted into “fortune phrases” with help from the Adobe Illustrator plug in http://scriptographer.org/each one with a unique font.

A large wooden “Word-A-coaster” built by Atom http://atomltd.com/ dispenses a plastic ball containing your unique fortune for 2012.

This is such a fantastic display of creativity and one that we’re so pleased to have played our part in. Now lets all get down to Selfridges to have a look!

Whilst most of the World was still drowning in tinsel, wrapping paper, Christmas lights and mince pies, we were taking delivery of our third HP Indigo 7500 (unfortunately Santa didn’t pop it under the tree for us!) to compliment the two we already have installed. This press is now up and running and once again we have got it fully loaded with the Heavy Substrate kit (meaning we can print up to 450mic board) as well as the white ink kit to enable us to continue producing unique and high impact materials.

10,000 Digital Paintings from FIELD on Vimeo.

SVK at the printers from BERG on Vimeo.