Sabine Lenz Highlights Latest dVice4 Issue (Video)
This week, Sabine Lenz of PaperSpecsGallery.com, calls attention to the latest issue of dVice4, produced by DCC Digital Color Concepts in New York, NY, and designed by OTTO.
Click on the YouTube video below to watch Lenz discuss the latest issue of dVice4:
The fourth edition—the first to be produced completely by digital means on digital papers—explores the food culture of New York City. From taco trucks to the fine-dining rooms of haute cuisine, the talented creators (photographers, graphic designers and printers) tell the stories of food and people from every corner of the globe in sumptuous slices of life.
Untying the twine by securing an outer wrapping of brown Kraft paper mounted to white butcher paper, I got quite a shock: printed images of raw pork and poultry. This revealed a chipboard sleeve that resembles an unbound hard-cover case. The spine is wrapped with black linen tape; the front cover displays the DV4 logo made from white vinyl, which has been sliced into a pattern of dripping shards (this graphic element repeats throughout the printed pieces). The sleeve holds eight adventure-filled booklets.
There are too many wonderful elements in this package—from papers, formats and images—to do them all justice, but we can say it offers creative inspiration at every turn, flip and unfold.
Some of the memorable moments in these booklets for me included:
- • Intimate photographs that set the mood and atmosphere and reveal unobserved details
- • Exquisite color reproduction (at times seeming three dimensional)
- • Meaningful formatting that sent unexpected messages (e.g. the portraits in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen booklet where every page is cut into four pieces so you can flip the sections creating new faces from the various features)
- • Playful bonus pieces like the piece of Mylar printed with the sheet music for the Mister Softee jingle
- • Useful items such as the placements (padded and backed with chipboard) that also send you on an interactive fast food tour via QR codes
In all, this project is thematically compelling, texturally rich and deliciously creative.
Sabine Lenz is the founder of PaperSpecs.com, the first online paper database and community specifically designed for paper specifiers.
Growing up in Germany, Sabine started her design career in Frankfurt, before moving to Australia and then the United States. She has worked on design projects ranging from corporate identities to major road shows and product launches. From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, her list of clients included Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Deutsche Bank, IBM and KPMG.
Seeing designers struggle worldwide to stay current with new papers and paper trends inspired Sabine to create PaperSpecs, an independent and comprehensive Web-based paper database and weekly e-newsletter. She is also a speaker on paper issues and the paper industry. Some refer to her lovingly as the "paper queen" who combines her passion for this wonderful substrate called paper with a hands-on approach to sharing her knowledge.