Blogs

In a transformation, clear and precise communication is essential.

There are a number of ways to get the best out of an accountability partner. Let’s look at all of them in a little more detail.

Individual posting impacts you – and your organization. Here are a few things to remember when posting online.

Sometimes marketers get stuck in a direct mail rut. They find a direct mail format that works and just stick to it.

Without considering postal requirements, PSPs can cause their clients to lose money and delay the delivery of mailpieces.

Whether you’re driving customers to your event, geopmapping on direct mail allows you to reach your customers using personalization.

A rotary diecutter/trimmer can be a valuable addition to your digital finishing portfolio.

How a print product feels can be more effective than how it looks. Textured print products elicit a positive response from consumers.

While machine data is useful, the press operator’s experience with the job provides the “missing link” in interpreting any problems.

A new initiative could succeed in pushing back against the printing industry’s recruitment crisis where past efforts have failed.

Keep your eyes open for changes that are coming, and for changes that you want to introduce into the marketplace.

Face it, we read about and experience a level of employee engagement in the printing industry that is much less than desired.

A targeted direct mail list is extremely effective. Analyzing the most effective list can help you identify prospective customers.

With its flexibility and an ability to produce small batches, digital printing is changing every category, but not magazine publishing.

When it comes to VDP, most printers accept what they get from customers. But should they improve the data to increase effectiveness?

With the expansion of wide-format printing, companies like Kennickell Group are able to offer a variety of wide-format options.

There is a way to get into the wide-format business and experiment with the concept without committing to huge capital expenditures.

The billboard might be the descendant of one the oldest forms of human advertising but it’s proving to the perfect partner for digital.

Barbara Pellow shares a story of a PSP that used Clickable Paper to deliver an omni-channel experience to a professional sports team.

Here are a few examples of what marketers are doing to optimize the print/mobile customer experience and maximize marketing spend.

Printers have barely begun exploiting interactive print and more importantly, to sell the concepts to their customers.

As printers continue to offer more applications created across diverse print technologies, a universal workflow is key.

Incorporating automation into your workflow can boost customer loyalty, improve your efficiency and increase your competitive edge.

On demand production print DFEs emerged in the late ’90s, but how have they evolved and what can printers expect in the future?

Landa Digital Printing captured the attention of drupa 2012 and 2016. However, news had been pretty quiet, until last week.

Durst Phototechnik and Koenig & Bauer are making production-level digital printers for both folding carton and corrugated applications.

The 7th annual Inkjet Summit kicked off yesterday in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., with more than 300 attendees.

Gina Ferrara digs deeper into her research with Madison Advisors on color migration and digital delivery.

The use of CMYK+ is poised for moderate page volume growth, based on several factors.

The perception of color is dependent on three distinct variables — the light source, the object and the receiver.

Don Piontek shares some of the diverse finishing applications and systems he’s come across in his career.

During a recent trade show, Don Piontek looked for the newest finishing technology and he found innovations in mechanical binding.

In the search for new finishing developments, Don Piontek received a LinkedIn press release alert on something called “Vpaper.”

At the beginning of 2019, buyers of publication grades will be paying about 25% more for paper than they did just 18 months earlier.

Did you know that paper absorbs moisture in the air, which can impact quality? Here’s a short guide on paper in relation to humidity.

Understanding your carbon footprint can decrease your consumption of energy and materials, reducing your carbon emissions.

Xerox recently unveiled the Iridesse. Now that the glitter has settled, there are a few questions to explore about its possibilities.

The grapevine has been ripe the past weeks, but now the news is finally out. Fujifilm has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the majority holding of Xerox Corporation and will merge Fuji Xerox with Xerox.

With Canon’s announcement of the Océ VarioPrint 6000 Titan, it’s a good time to revisit the cut-sheet monochrome digital market.

We have seen lots of advances in adhesives for bookbinding over the years, with PUR (polyurethane reactive) adhesive being the last major game changer. But there is now a revived interest in protein-based adhesives.

Quick! Name two consumables that are indispensable to operation in the bindery. If you named adhesives as one, you'd be on the mark. But...if you included knives, (yes, they are a consumable), you would be quite savvy. Cutting and trimming are part of almost every finishing operation. And the quality of those cuts are essential to the quality of the finished product.

Adhesives are widely used in finishing, this includes perfect binding, folding, mailing, and folding carton applications. And coatings and various chemical solutions are used in the digital print process to both enhance image quality and make the paper more "finishing-friendly." Both chemistry and environmental control have a lot to do with systems performance.

OK, I digress from my usual finishing tech. discussion this week. Although I’m on the digital finishing side, I spent enough time in the high-volume offset world to become quite familiar with publication, periodical and catalog production.

We were in Japan last month, and as luck would have it, we were there at the same time that Komori held an open house to showcase its newest digital print solutions. This international event took place at Komori’s facility in Tsukuba, Japan, and drew hundreds of attendees from all over the Asia Pacific region. It also provided the opportunity to showcase its Impremia IS29, a B2-format, sheetfed, UV inkjet printer.

In a sense, Berlin Industries was once the king of Chicago. Last week, the remaining assets were auctioned off. If you were there, you could have purchased a Heidelberg Sunday M3000 five-unit web press for a mere $47,000.

What follows is an interview with Rosemarie Breske Garvey, VP at Blooming Color in Lombard, Ill. Blooming Color is doing some pretty spectacular work beyond traditional four-color printing and I wanted to learn more.

Dscoop is part tradeshow and part education event, with an agenda that included A-List keynotes and mentalist Lior Suchard as emcee. The sessions were the expected array of customer success stories, successful selling solutions and product reviews, but there were also a variety of sessions covering finishing, packaging and 3D printing.

It looked like a good fit. The seller, unfortunately, didn’t see it that way.

As a trade association president, I knew that one of my most important jobs was to offer our members a friendly, well informed, third-party perspective on strategic business issues. Today, our New Direction Partners clients want the same thing: not just information about the mechanics of M&As, but also a genuine understanding of the industry and the mindsets of the people who own those companies.

For many years, I had the privilege of serving in leadership positions with Printing Industries of New England (PINE), the largest printing trade association in the Northeast. Then as now, I was greatly impressed by the resiliency of our members and their ability to adapt to changing business circumstances.