Single-Pass Test Drive

Like the sleek lines of a luxury automobile, a prime print project begins with a designer's vision—which can be exciting and challenging all at once. The concept for GM's 2004 Cadillac XLR brochure is as dreamy as the car itself: shiny, metallic, just like the engine block and body paint. How did the form-follow-content approach transfer to the printed page? Quite well, thanks to some innovative thinking in the pressroom.

"We weren't so sure at first," says Suzi Romanik, account executive at 400-employee Cenveo Anderson Lithograph, Los Angeles. "Metallic inks usually don't do justice to car photos." The printer tested a "super silver" metallic ink that's also super expensive—nine times the cost of PMS 877 Metallic. Price considerations aside, Cadillac's Troy, MI ad agency, chemistri, liked how the metal flecks and extra sheen looked on Sappi's 80-lb. McCoy Gloss Cover.

The green light quickly turned yellow, however, when the printer was faced with the logistics of running double-pass on an eight-color, 58-page job with a quantity of 60,000. "Wet-trapping wouldn't suffice," Romanik notes. Pressroom supervisor Val Cummings could already hear the groaning across the plant, and he put on the brakes. What if the firm's Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102 could run UV and conventional ink together, he wondered.

Since installing the first U.S. 10-color version of this versatile sheetfed three years ago, they'd always used it in an either/or scenario. The stage was set for a test drive. "We formulated the 'super silver' as a UV-based ink, and it worked," Romanik says. Just to be sure, they press-proofed every form, made color-corrections, and only then re-created all the masks for the silver plate.

Ability to print in a single pass was only part of Cummings' task. The job features five vellum sheets (43-lb. Chatham Birch and Clear) that were printed with three hits of white to achieve the desired effect. Meanwhile, the super silver ink was too reflective to be readable on type, so a more conventional metallic spot color was added to the mix.

Then came binding, which posed its own set of obstacles for the 13¾×9¾″ oblong trim size. Cenveo Anderson turned to Roswell Bookbinding, Phoenix, which has a niche for odd-sized, big books (see GAM 11/04, p. 47). Roswell laminated the Reich Shine Cover to a text stock and Smyth-sewed the books before shipping them to Color Communications, Inc. (CCI), Chicago, which specializes in affixing automotive paint swatches.

"We saved the toughest two pages for last," Romanik says, adding that's not the way they planned it. There were a lot of last-minute changes, she explains, which required tight coordination with Roswell and CCI.

All the ink, sweat and press proofs paid off: After landing a "Gold Caddy" award from the Detroit Creative Directors Council, the XLR roadster piece was chosen as the best among more than 6,000 entries at Sappi's 2004 Gold Awards, earning Cenveo Anderson both North American and International Printer of the Year distinction.

Imagine that: The company claimed two prestigious industry honors—in a single pass.