Good To Go
When considering the gains and losses that result from automating the product development cycle, it’s helpful to take a look at what lies outside the realm of package production—namely, the creative process itself. As a package travels from a creative idea to the retailer’s shelf, the opportunity and challenge for suppliers of packaging preproduction software lies in identifying and eliminating steps in the development cycle that can compromise the integrity of the design process and prevent the speedy execution of a project.
“The function of packaging prepress is to find the best possible compromise between the greatest creativity and the limitations of the printing process on the back end,” says Jan De Roeck, director for solutions management, -EskoArtwork. “Compression of the market cycle is a welcome challenge for preproduction software suppliers because there is an opportunity to meet the needs of designers and enable them to do a better job.”
In other words, while it can’t automate the design part, technology can provide the tools that enable designers to give brand owners precisely what that want.
Getting the green light
After formulating an idea, but before the design enters production, digital technology can reduce the number of times a file must be reviewed and pare the number of physical mock-ups required for customer approval to a single prototype. The savings, in terms of time and labor, can be significant.
Before the advent of virtual prototyping, the only way for a designer to make a 3D mock-up was to use conventional production techniques to make a series of physical mock-ups before gaining customer approval. Today, products like EskoArtwork’s Studio, which functions as a 3D visualizer window inside Adobe Illustrator, and EskoArtwork’s Visualizer, which is designed to accurately simulate “finishing layers” like embossing, varnish, glitter, and gold and silver foil, can help designers spot errors before they become costly problems. Using such products cuts out the intermediate steps and allows the achievement of customer approval much more quickly. Ideally, only one prototype need be created before the product goes to market.
An added benefit of virtual prototyping, De Roeck says, is that it enables the brand owner to see how the design will interact with a given retail environment, or even where the consumer may use the packaged product. What will it look like under fluorescent or incandescent light? How it will appear next to its close competitors? These are among the key factors brand owners consider when deciding to accept the design or ask for changes.
Ready, set, produce!
From the perspective of brand owners, the point at which a design achieves final approval and moves into the production phase is typically a time of increased anxiety. It is at this point in the development cycle that brand owners can spend a lot of money and lose precious time making changes and compromises because the the package design cannot be produced as intended. This is where prepress comes into play—by making sure the design can be rendered printable and reproducible, color managing the file, and efficiently and cost-effectively imposing and finishing the file.
According to De Roeck, “Designers will use as many colors as they need and Illustrator will permit them to make sure the design looks great. From a technical point of view, however, it may be totally unprintable. We employ a variety of prepress tools to separate the design file into the -appropriate inks, for example, and render it production-ready across multiple substrates and print disciplines. It is the function of prepress to make sure it all looks like the same brand. Color management is one very large area we can effectively automate.”
Reusing design assets can also facilitate the transition from design to production. Ideally, the CAD file used to create a 3D visualization, while the designer was working in Illustrator, is the same one that will be used by the die maker to make the production tools. Separations representing gold and silver foils, embossing, and other finishing layers, also can be used to manufacture printing plates and other production tools.
“Assuming this is the case,” De Roeck says, “we have saved a lot of time in the design-to-shelf cycle and greatly reduced the risk of error. This translates immediately into dollars for the brand owner.”
By the same token, he explains, the same output the designer has been using to secure the brand owner’s preproduction approval could be recycled and reused to create complementary products such as in-store point-of-purchase (POP) displays. All this recycling and repurposing gives designers more time for creative work, rather than for performing mundane, mechanical tasks. Having the ability to pull logos and copy variations directly from a brand owner’s database still leaves the designer with responsibility for placing the copy on a label or package and integrating it into the overall design in an aesthetically pleasing way. The difference is that he no longer has to worry about typing errors or whether the copy is up to date. “The execution of a project is where software can make life a lot easier,” says De Roeck.
Graphic arts
Automation itself is still a work in progress, according to De Roeck. “There is a reason our industry is called the ‘graphic arts,’” he notes. “A number of our processes still rely on individual skills and human intervention. In today’s challenging economic circumstances, eliminating the reliance on these skills would bring a lot of benefit back to the companies involved in our business. Do we lose something in the process? Of course, but we lose it for a good cause.”
In the meantime, responsibility for compressing time-to-market is being pushed steadily downstream, with the buck finally coming to rest with the printer, who must match whatever comes off the press to a given reference, then impose and finish the file as efficiently and economically as possible. “Converters have an opportunity to master the process in order to satisfy their brand-owner customers,” says De Roeck. “It’s also an area where converters can still make a competitive difference.” pP
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- Artwork Systems