Researchers Uncover Snap Rustle and Pop within Print

Print is often mistaken by the casual observer as a form of purely visual data, and its effectiveness is misunderstood, and undervalued, as a result. Print is much more than visual, as is evident to the hundreds of thousands of us toiling in this industry, and to those reading GAM in its printed form. If you attended Graph Expo or received your October issue in the mail, for example, you will have experienced this copy with its lenticular cover, or recent issues with extended digital color sets, multiple layers of coating or dramatic foil effects—all much more than the sum of a series of high-resolution PDF files committed to substrates.

Each page—once imposed, plated and conveyed to the fast-running web in that miracle of oleophilic attraction and transfer—carries textual content, to be sure, but also visual, tactile, and even aural and odoriferous components.

Finnish paper firm UPM-Kymmene has been conducting research to analyze the sensory properties of paper beyond what our eyes see. Despite the fact that people experience the world around them with all five senses, the importance of the multi-sensory perception of print has been mostly overlooked in the brand-building business, contend the UPM researchers. So it hopes to develop new, sensory-based methods for analyzing papers—beyond the whiteness and opacity that printers care about—to identify what appeals most to consumers. Intending to study these factors scientifically, it has empaneled both experts and customers at its research center and in public forums.

The “Touch & Feel” research project aims at finding the right product for the right target group. “New alternatives can be found when we have identified those sensory properties that are the most appealing to a chosen target group,” says UPM's senior researcher Matti Ristolainen of the firm's project. “Using five senses in choosing preferences is quite natural and quite self-evident—but challenging to verify scientifically.” And during the course of the research, “We also expect to create significant tools for our future product development,” Ristolainen notes.

Traditionally, paper selection has been based purely on technical and visual properties. Initial findings demonstrate that paper also can be seen as “strong” or “delicate” and “weighty” or “light,” even “extravagant” or “restrained.” Considering the selection criteria of end users today, it has been proven that the paper of choice should not only look but also feel, smell and even sound attractive.

A survey of paper buyers this spring identified the sound, browsing, posture and relative pleasantness of two different paper stocks. The panel used 60-page magazines with covers removed as test examples. The magazines were rotogravure printed on lightweight coated and supercalendered paper grades.

Those printed on uncoated paper were considered very agreeable to browse and pleasant to read, according to Dr. Ristolainen. Those printed on coated paper were valued for the print quality and gloss.

“I was a little bit surprised that such a high figure as 30% of the evaluators weighted easy browsing and posture as the most important paper characteristics,” says Dr. Ristolainen. “Around 60% found the visual appearance to be the most important quality.”

The research so far has shown that different people provide amazingly similar responses to paper when blind-tested in panels. According to the end-user responses, paper needs to have, for example, the right browsability, sound and visual appearance to fulfill customer's senses. While fashion work goes predictably to high-grade stocks, and supermarket flyers to low-grade, for certain buyers, such as sales catalog printers, thickness, sound and bulk are decisive criteria in choosing paper. bill.esler@reedbusiness.com