The prepress renaissance

Pushing the limits of packaging graphics to help sell products on the store shelf has resulted in a new prepress art form.

Today's package printers are, more often than not, required to be true creative design advisors, offering guidance and suggestions for crafting artwork out of packaging materials and pushing the limits of prepress delivery to enhance point-of-purchase appeal. The result: a new art of prepress, driven to deliver extravagant designs.

Inland Paperboard and Packaging foresaw this renaissance—a change in the way its customers were expecting services such as mockups, design enhancements, and new ideas for delivering packaging. In the early '90s, these expectations were pushing the limits of what packaging could deliver as an expression of art, not just as a product.

As a response, Inland created the Graphics Resource Center (GRC, Indianapolis, Ind.) in 1992 to provide a full service facility to deliver customer service and support throughout the entire production process. Inland executives understood a decade ago that packaging projects were going to demand more interaction from progressive package printing organizations, with much more involvement at the beginning of the design process. GRC offers the expertise of professionals with skills well beyond the basics of flexography and more advanced than just creative designing.

"We often find that design firms and some outside creative people tend to make extravagant designs that look wonderful, but simply are not printable," said Terry Ong, general manager of Inland Paperboard and Packaging, GRC. Redesign is then required, and this is where Inland steps in.

Accomplishing redesigns at this stage requires specific, detailed knowledge in the development of high-quality graphics for packaging; high-quality mini- or full-size mockups; real-time, on-line electronic proof viewing and/or mark-up with customers; and full-service capabilities—all under one roof and all mandatory in today's packaging environment.

Inland demonstrated these capabilities through its work with Naturalle Spring Water. This project's objective was to elevate the look of the package to compete with other bottled waters. The original package was a simple two-color job—lifeless and dreary. Inland's GRC professionals envisioned graphics that would draw the customer in with an image of water in various aspects. They desired dimensional imagery and a vibrant appearance.

The end result was a very pleasing, eye-popping nature collage, with the graphic design reflecting the product on the inside. The drop shadows vignette perfectly, creating depth and contrast—a full circle from its previous package design.

Form, function, and design

Feeling the pressure from customers to push the limits and raise the bar of flexographic printing, Ong and his team are constantly striving to exceed customers' expectations, balancing creativity and design. "Designers must create layouts that relate the customer's expectations and the overall package design," he states.

David Schawk, president and CEO, Schawk Inc. (Des Plaines, Ill.), agrees. "Creative packaging has become so important for the promotion of the product that all consumer companies are realizing this and making more of their marketing budgets allocated to redesigning the packaging," he reports. "What our clients have, and are continuing to realize, is that not only is creative important, but the execution is even more critical to address the speed to market issues." By designing packaging that will print and meet customer's expectations, Schawk saves its clients time and money.

Schawk helped Unilever Bestfoods North America improve quality standards for gravure printing, cut time-to-market, and reduce costs. Three of Schawk's operating units combined efforts to do separations, engraving, and cylinder proofing, while working closely with printers to achieve these gains.

By developing new workflow standards, Schawk made it possible for Unilever to achieve the highest quality reproduction of its packaging that prints via gravure, regardless of the substrate or ink system. It gave Unilever greater freedom in the design concept phase, allowing the company to take full advantage of shrink-wrap and foil-laminated substrates.

Design momentum

2Sisters Design (Redwood Shores, Calif.) is the combination of two award-winning designers, and as the name suggests, sisters Karen Uhl Vano and Jenniver Uhl Maurry. With their design experience, they have led strategic initiatives for print brand development, environmental design, and packaging. The pair developed the Pottery Barn Summer Promotional Kit, with Pottery Barn directing and designing the art. The kit featured custom lemon crate packaging, key product pop-up, and poster.

Vano and Maurry agree that package printers want more than plain and simple. Designs that are both functional and visually stimulating, even extravagant, are the direction progressive package printers are taking. Vano states, "Packaging demands and expectations, from a design standpoint, are more complex and require a better understanding of design, functionality, and, in many ways, true artistic expression."

Clearly, today's package printing operations are pushing to be a true design arm for their clients. In the retail setting, Ong said GRC's goal is for its packaging to sell itself better than the competition, through "colorful, eye-catching graphics, innovative graphic designs, and higher grade and higher holdout papers that help to make graphics pop." With these new measures, the art of prepress has been reborn.

By Marie Alonso, Prepress Editor

Marie Alonso has been covering the printing industry since 1994 and is the editorial director of PrintWriter.com. She welcomes responses at 856-216-9956 or marie@printwriter.com.