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Tomorrow's industry will rely on efficient facilities, highly automated equipment, real-time communications, and well-trained people. The ideal printing plant of the future-what will it look like? For this special supplement [...]

By Mark Vruno A remarkable self-promotion by Classic Color used eight inter-station curing units. A design by renowned graphic artist Rick Valicenti is light on text and heavy on envisioning [...]

By Mark Vruno, Executive Editor Houston-based printer caps $47 million, two-year spend with 36 HP Indigos. The Consolidated Graphics international printing network made a major move into expanding its digital [...]

By Mark Vruno, Executive Editor Boutique shop uses prepress tools to boost pressroom quality, productivity. Can a strategy of postponing capital investment work effectively? The over-achieving story of Avante, Llc. [...]

By Mark Vruno, Executive Editor Common platforms led RR Donnelley to insert Pro Line into its portfolio. Perhaps no printing company knows better than RR Donnelley that there's money to [...]

By Mark Vruno Executive Editor On the border, a leading Canadian printer to the trade exports one of every four jobs to the U.S. It has added new presses, too, [...]

By Mark Vruno Executive Editor Versatile Chicago firm adds two new sheetfed presses, color digital and FSC certification, closing out 2007 with 20% growth-again. You name it, Schiele Group probably [...]

By Mark Vruno Executive Editor Mid-size shop in the Midwest prints conventional sheetfed, wide-format digital and, now, direct imaging dry offset for high-quality short runs on demand. Jerry Keller had [...]

By Mark Vruno Printing on magnetized substrates poses a challenging proposition. Charging and static issues are just the tip of the horseshoe (magnet), so to speak. Yet, as marketers strive [...]

By Mark Vruno, Executive Editor Computer-to-conventional UV platesetter technology drives 4-color production-at 40 plates per hour. If, as U.S. printing patriarch Ben Franklin said, a penny saved is a penny [...]

By Mark Vruno When the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation wanted to compare stochastic ink consumption with conventionally screened jobs running on its MAN Roland web press, it chose a linear [...]

By Mark Vruno Color sells, and so does variable-data print. So what better combination than to marry the two, as Hewlett-Packard and Graphic Arts Monthly have done on this month's [...]

By Mark Vruno, Senior Editor How does a 100-year-old company stay youthful? Racing toward a new workflow is one way . . . How does a company celebrating its centennial [...]

By Mark Vruno, Senior Editor Embracing technology to sell more in-house services is crucial to printer/mailer's success. Industry experts contend that for every $1 that American companies spend on print, [...]

As production schedules continue to compress, remote proofing can make last-minute color changes virtually painless. Just ask Primary Color, the $40-million California-based graphic arts firm that specializes in prepress, sheetfed [...]

Crawford Industries, Crawfordsville, IN, is well-known for its graphic-quality polyethylene and polypropylene sheet used in information and consumer packaging, advertising and promotional products. The plastic substrates are the environmentally friendly [...]

Many of the 94 employees at MAR Graphics, near St. Louis, truly sympathize with the Gulf Coast printing companies that were deluged by flood waters this past summer. (See related [...]

Wayne Carter likes to work up a good sweat. The 58-year-old printing company owner works hard, and he plays hard, too. Three days a week, Carter wakes up at 4:30 [...]

Whether it's Chinese, Japanese or Korean, Russian, Spanish or Yiddish, Jimmy Lin knows how to talk printing to his customers. Not that he's fluent in all these tongues, but the [...]

American Greetings makes the business case for production technology-today and tomorrow. Have you finished your holiday shopping yet--for 1998, that is? It's only January, but the people at American Greetings [...]

Chemistries, blankets, ink and other pressroom consumables typically have come from familiar local supply sources or nationwide networks, such as Enovation Graphics, Pitman and xpedx. But the lines have blurred [...]

A growing mid-size sheetfed printer welcomes imagesetting film that offers a mix of hard-dot quality, rapid-access speed, and lower operating costs. Like most growing printing companies, Premier Graphics is learning [...]

The article reports the new coupons printing facility at Valpak's unit of Cox Newspapers, which is scheduled to begin operations by May 2007, in St. Petersburg. Cox executives come up with a state of the art coupon printing and mailing center featuring the latest plant automation. It is a non stop, small batch technology that will produce twice the volume in half the time with almost half the manpower. Goss Auto Transfer units, automated guided vehicle cranes, and automated storage retrieval systems adds to the 4-color plate change on the fly every hour to produce 10,000 versioned coupons every 12 minutes with minimal human intervention. This is the most advanced material-handling concepts as said by Werner Naegeli, president of Muller Martini.

The article focuses on the printing solutions incorporated by several print shops in their production. It says that the SigmaLine in-line digital book manufacturing solution is used by Worldcolor for its facility in Dubuque, Iowa. It adds that David Allan, who is the owner of Allan Graphics, has added a Xerox 700 Digital Color Press to his 8,000 square-foot plant in Canada. Moreover, a Flex Book line from Magnum Digital Solutions was comprised by Webcom Inc. in its book production.

The article focuses on an open-minded management style. Topics discussed include how this management style empowers employees, benefits a manager and makes decisions, what sales consultant and print industry veteran Wayne Peterson calls the organization-destroying habit of subatomic managers and the adverse effects on the organization of what he calls control-freak management creatures, and a key attribute of open-minded managers.

The article discusses the application of personalized Uniform Resource Locators (pURL) in the cover project of the "Graphic Arts Monthly" (GAM).The editors of the magazine assign personalized Web sites as part of its semi-annual data renewal effort. It could be noted that MindFire is developing applications and services to help marketers synchronize direct-mail campaigns with the Internet's interactive capabilities. A study reports that one in three people prefers responding to direct mail online. This suggests that sending mail to a cookie-cutter corporate Web site is not good for Web-savvy audiences. A personal Web page may also include local weather reports and an image of the state's official bird.