Art and print have been happy bedfellows for years, with the likes of Andy Warhol through to Gilbert and George using the printed form as a means of artistic expression. This noble tradition is being continued at the moment in the French city of Arles as part of the annual Les Recontres photography exhibition. In an abandoned warehouse French artist JR – backed by a $100,000 prize fund from the creative non-profit organisation TED – has created a participatory art project called ‘Inside Out’ that’s enthralling visitors.

In the middle of a darkened building the street artist, whose modus operandi is to make black and white prints of his photographs and then paste them on the streets (his work has adorned the exterior of Tate Modern in London), has set up a high street photo booth with a difference. Subjects walk into the booth to have their portrait taken. These are then relayed to an HP Designjet Z6200 large-format inkjet photo printer, which is positioned out of sight on a mezzanine floor 40ft above the ground. The whole process from photograph to output takes around five minutes and when the portrait is complete it dramatically emerges from an elevated slot and flutters to the participant waiting below.

The artist is taking and printing around 80 90×135cm portraits per day on average, with just shy of 5,000 prints produced since the exhibition commenced in July. In addition to the portrait snaps taken at the Arles booth individuals can also submit photographs online, which are printed and then posted out by the artist. (more…)

The advertising and wide format print industries have been collaborating for years to try and make greener billboards, but no one has been able to master the trick – until now. With the unveiling of Europe’s first ‘eco-board’ at a site next to the M4 motorway in London in late June, Ricoh has set the digital signage bar high for others to follow.

The eco-board, which Ricoh worked on with integrated outdoor services provider Rainmaker, is powered by 96 solar panels and five wind turbines and only lights up when sufficient power has been collected during the day.

It’s not the first time the company has trialled this kind of digital signage technology. Last year it unveiled a 47ft high by 126ft long solar powered billboard on the corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street in New York’s Times Square. The board is powered by 62 solar panels and 24 thin-film PV solar modules and illuminated by 16 LED floodlights.

Like its UK counterpart the billboard, which earlier this year featured one of the largest QR codes ever printed to help raise funds for victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, does not take power from the grid to light it – if there’s a lack of sunlight during the day Ricoh has pledged that it will allow the board to go dark. It’s counter-intuitive to allow an advertisement to be shrouded in darkness but Ricoh says that it wants to challenge other advertisers and marketers to conjure up equally creative and environmentally friendly ways to promote their own and their client’s products. (more…)

The countdown has begun. It’s less than a year until the 2012 Olympic Games in London gets underway and over the course of the next few months a raft of printed paraphernalia will be produced for games organisers and official sponsors alike, providing a welcome shot in the arm for the UK printing industry. The intensity of activity will continue to build as the Games approaches with the weeks leading up to the event itself set to see the nation’s printers involved in a whirlwind of activity.

For many print businesses it marks the culmination of a journey that commenced in 2008, when the London Delivery Authority put a number of four-year print jobs out to tender. These jobs ranged from the production of mundane branded stationery through to marketing collateral. But the biggest job of the lot was, until last week, kept – literally – under wraps. After months of uncertainty about the viability of the project, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) finally announced that a proposed wrap encircling the Olympic Stadium would be sponsored and fabricated by worldwide Olympic partner Dow Chemical.

The wrap’s figures make for impressive reading. It will consist of 336 panels that are each approximately 25m high and 2.5m wide and has a price-tag of around £7m (the exact specifications have yet to be released but in the original plan the wrap had an estimated length of 900m). (more…)

Can wide-format printing companies still use the ‘sustainability’ badge as a point of differentiation to win new business? Over the last few years it’s been a subject that’s sparked a heated debate. After all, every printer worth his (or her) salt has by now latched onto the fact that offering an environmentally-friendly printing service is right up there at the top of the list of client demands.

The flipside of this is that pretty much every printer has gone down the green route (or intends to), which, from the outside at least, suggests that sustainability is no longer the differentiator that it once was.

However, anecdotally it seems like sustainability can make a difference and indeed already is. I’ve spoken to a number of different wide-format operators in recent months that pride themselves on their environmental achievements and say that in a pitch, having strong green credentials can be the deciding factor.

The findings of my unscientific research were borne out by InfoTrends research published at the end of last year. The research group identified green wide-format printing as one of its top trends for 2011 with just shy of 50% of printers have or intend to produce print in a more environmentally friendly manner. But what’s behind this push? Is it concern for the environmental well-being of the world or, rather cynically, is it because the InfoTrends research identified that 45% of printers polled stated that they were getting more requests from customers for green printers?

It’s difficult to say for sure but one point worth making to printers is if you’re going to trade on the strengths of your green leanings make sure you do it in the correct manner. Telling customers that you use FSC or PEFC paper is fine, as is informing them that you’ve attained some sort of green certification or other. But beware of falling into the trap of using woolly environmental statements or marketing to impress. (more…)

Welcome to the house of the future. The hallway floor features a large map of your local area, in the living room the leather sofa is emblazoned with your favourite work of art, the wall is covered by a decal portraying the self-same view of the foreign beach that you enjoyed from your honeymoon suite, the bathroom shower curtain shows you scuba diving in a coral reef during your sun-kissed Caribbean break last year and the kitchen blind is covered with a giant image of your pet dog. That’s not forgetting of course the bespoke canvases dotted about various walls of the house featuring a mixture of family members and holiday snaps.

Until recently custom made items of furniture were the preserve of the upper classes. However, thanks to advances in wide-format digital technology furnishings for the house of the future are available to everyone today – not just interior designers. Anyone can commission personalised home furnishings relatively cheaply – from digitally printed fabrics for the creation of bespoke cushions or curtains, through to wallpaper featuring high-resolution pictures or designs of your choosing.

Take that shower curtain, for example. US-based website photoshowercurtain.com is just one of a number of businesses capable of sticking your favourite water-related image onto plastic (prices start at $150). Then there’s the hallway floor map. UK-based PrintedSpace can print the map of your choice using its specially developed Floorink technology onto vinyl cushion flooring (the company also offers personalised blinds and wall decals). (more…)

As England found to its cost, bidding for the privilege to host an international sporting tournament can be a fraught experience. While the country was successful in pitching for the 2012 Olympics it failed miserably in its attempts to secure the right to host the 2018 World Cup. One nation that appears to have the Midas touch in this field at the moment is Brazil.

In 2014 the South American giant will hold the World Cup and then two years later the Olympic Games. The high profile nature of the events will place the country, which boasts one of the world’s fastest growing economies, firmly on the map. The events also present boundless opportunities for printers and suppliers of printing equipment to the region.

Brazil has already witnessed the start of a printing boom with the number of printing companies in Brazil rising rapidly over the last few years – 2,000 new printing companies were established between 2006 and 2009 alone, according to research conducted by the Brazilian graphic arts association ABIGRAF. The same research highlights that 45% of printers have screen printing equipment that’s 6-10-years-old with almost 14% of screen printing kit more than 10-years-old. These figures suggest that there is plenty of scope for print equipment manufacturers to cash in. Especially as the use of screen printing is already growing rapidly. ABIGRAF says that in 2006 263 new screen printing machines were bought, which rose to 307 in 2007 and 953 in 2008, the last year for which numbers are available. (more…)

It’s predicted to be a game changer – and not just for printing. It could entirely change the way that products are produced in the future, cutting costs and time to market significantly.

Although 3D printing has been around for decades, most of the print engines have been housed at universities or in the development labs of large corporations. But over the past couple of years a number of cut-price machines, fuelled by the boom of the ‘maker’ culture in the United States have hit the market making 3D printing available to hobbyists.

From the plug-n-print 3D printer offered by Botmill (www.botmill.com) for just over £1,000 through to the Thing-O-Matic (available from 3D print supplier RepRap www.reprapcentral.com), which is available at a similar price point, the cost of 3D printing has reduced significantly – RepRap last month also introduced a ‘large format’ printer called the RepRap Mondo, featuring a build area of 305×460x280mm, available for the princely sum of £999. It’s not just obscure one-man-band start-ups that are offering the technology. Print manufacturing behemoths such as HP now have a 3D print presence and 3D print stalwarts like Z Corp offer larger build size machines – its ZPrinter 650 has a maximum resolution of 600×540dpi with a build size of 254×381x203mm. (more…)

Until relatively recently social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were seen as great networking tools but few had worked out how to make money from them (including the site owners themselves). However, that changed recently with the launch of Facebook deals (and LinkedIn’s impressive flotation on the US stock exchange).

Originally only available in the US, the social networking site rolled deals out to Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK earlier this year. The idea is beautifully simple. Smartphone users ‘check in’ to places on Facebook (eg: hotels, shopping centres, restaurants) and receive deals from nearby establishments. The perception is that the main companies who will benefit from deals are restaurants and high street retailers, but there’s no reason why savvy printers can’t offer Facebook deals themselves. For instance, high street copy shops could offer consumers deals around the printing of digital images from their smartphones or cameras.

Another way to drum up business using Facebook and Twitter, is by building a team of online followers. Most of the world’s biggest brands have Facebook and Twitter pages – indeed some online experts predict that one-day branded Facebook pages could replace official company websites. Simply adding ‘Follow us on Facebook/Twitter’ links to the homepage of your website or on company emails could see you rapidly build a substantial online following to whom you can offer exclusive deals or discounts. Mining the data of your band of followers could also identify some interesting business opportunities. (more…)

Major inroads have been made in recent years into changing the perception of print as an industry that is damaging to the environment. Clearly there is still a long way to go in addressing the public’s lingering concerns, with some parts of the print production chain proving more successful than others at conveying the message about their green credentials.

One sector that arguably – in the past at least – could have done more than others to better communicate the progress that has been made in this area is wide-format print. Historically some wide-format jobs by their very nature were unrecyclable and until relatively recently it wasn’t an area where clients expected or demanded a ‘green’ service. However, these expectations have slowly but surely changed and as a result the industry has been forced to take action.

And the progress made so far has been impressive. Fespa’s ‘evolution’ report, which canvassed 140 print companies from EMEA and the US, found that 45.5% of those questioned had developed green printing practices during the course of 2010.

They’ve been greatly helped by manufacturers of wide-format kit who have conjured up leaner greener presses, eco-friendly inks and perhaps more importantly a raft of green substrates.

These range from the likes of NatureWoven Gossyp – a digitally printable material made from organic cotton and backed with natural latex that can be disposed of by composting – through to recyclable high density polyethylene banners that are provide a viable and highly durable alternative to traditional PVC scrim banners. To reinforce the green message many printers also offer a free ‘pick up and recycle’ scheme for end of life banners. (more…)