An 'I' for Ingenuity

By any measure, Genuity's Black Rocket booklet is distinctive. Its covers are made of shiny aluminum. A slightly jagged, lower-case "i"—which is meant to embody "ingenuity"—is diecut through the middle of the cover and on every page except the back cover. Open the 24-page booklet and one encounters an array of printing techniques and special effects: one page is a wall of embossed reddish-brown bricks, for example, while another reveals itself to be a gatefold.

Given the ambition, complexity, and high quality of the Genuity piece, it's not surprising that last year the Printing Industries of America bestowed a Premier Print ("Benny") award upon the booklet.

The purpose of the Genuity booklet is to promote Black Rocket, an e-business platform that integrates managed hosting, access, transport, and data security in a single package. A product of Burlington, Mass.-based network service provider Genuity, Black Rocket allows companies to launch through a single vendor an e-business initiative, complete with content delivery and 24/7 monitoring and technical support.

Genuity commissioned Mullen Advertising, Wenham, Mass., to create an eye-catching promotional booklet for Black Rocket. An elegant mix of text and surprising imagery, the 7 1/8x11 1/8" booklet incorporates myriad personal touches and printing techniques. For instance, in every copy of the piece, a Black Rocket sticker has been removed from the gatefold of sticker sheets and hand-placed on the image of a businessman's black briefcase that appears on the previous page.

"The Genuity booklet was one of the most involved projects we've worked on," says Harrison Vieira, a sales associate for Bedford, Mass.-based W.E. Andrews, which printed the piece. "We probably did more testing on this booklet than anything else we've done," he asserts, adding that the Genuity booklet was so involved that the printing company dedicated a production person solely to the project.

W.E. Andrews produced color separations on a Crosfield Celsis 6250 drum scanner, and printed 35,000 copies of the booklet on a 40" eight-color Komori Lithrone press. It used Sun Chemical inks, with a PMS match brown, PMS match gray, PMS 8002 silver, PMS 876 gold, and copious amounts of extra black.

The company also added off-line spot gloss varnish and spot dull varnish.

Inside the punched aluminum cover on the flyleafs is 28-lb. Gilclear medium white translucent paper. Specified for the embossed brick page was 100-lb. McCoy gloss cover stock, while 80-lb. McCoy gloss cover was used for the text pages, 80-lb. Mohawk superfine white eggshell text for the envelope, and 60-lb. Aquatech cast coated paper for the sticker sheets.

Using pewter-colored wire, the booklet was Wire-O bound by Boston-based Pearl Book Binding.

Says Mullen Advertising senior production manager Dorothy Urlich of the Genuity booklet, "The client is thrilled, the sales force is thrilled. Given the complexity and the challenges of the booklet, it's been one of the most rewarding pieces I've worked on. Every page had its own special issues."

W.E. Andrews likewise is pleased with the product. "It's definitely a showcase piece," says Vieira. "When we present a proposal to a customer, we include the Genuity booklet. It was a true test of everyone here."