Articles

Dear Readers,
we are pleased to present you the Polish-English edition of “Świat DRUKU” (The World of Printing). It is devoted to labels and flexible packaging. It was supposed to be a showcase of the Polish label sector at the Labelexpo 2022 trade fair, but as we know, this event has been postponed until next year. However, nothing lost – we will be distributing it at other industry events, both at home and abroad.
Enjoy your reading!
You can download the English version for free HERE.

We talk to Neil Felton, CEO of FESPA, about the opportunities and threats of this autumn's FESPA Global Print Expo and European Sign Expo and the state of the large format and screen printing industry.

By Dieter Finna

The total cost of label production is determined by three key factors: quality, cost, and productivity. These must not be considered in isolation from each other, which nevertheless occurs due to the complexity in practice. While clear ideas exist regarding the achievable quality and costs of a label printing machine prior to any investment decision, productivity in consideration of the process variability often receives too little attention when making a purchase decision. How big the influence of this criterion on the total operating costs is, is shown in the following example.

By Sonja Angerer

At the Chili Publish Spicy Talks in Berlin on November 6^th to 7th, it became clear that there is still plenty of room for automation in the printing and creative industries. This is likely to cause some stir within the industry, and that might especially be true for Central and Eastern European countries.

About 200 members of the "Smart Template Community" came to the "Silent Green" location at Berlin-Wedding. The fourth (official) edition of the Chili Publish Spicy Talks took place a former crematorium-turned-event-location: Two full days on the topics of Smart Templates, automation, design, as well as future business models in the printing industry. The conference was split into three tracks, between which users and interested parties could switch at leisure.

By Nessan Cleary

Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get back to work. We’ve seen an enormous number of changes over the past decade, and since the phrase 2020 also signifies perfect eyesight, it seems appropriate to kick off the year with an assessment of some of the trends that we can expect to encounter over the next few years.

The past decade has shown four big trends for those of us involved in printing – the growth of inkjet, the emergence of industrial printing, the development of additive manufacturing and a general embrace of cloud computing – and naturally these will continue and, most likely, define the next decade, at least in terms of the printing industry.

By Lorenzo Villa

Mainstream operators, innovators, artisans and packaging professionals light up the web-to-print landscape. If the Internet has democratised access to information and social media have stimulated interaction between brands, retailers and consumers, Amazon has convinced buyers of all kinds and all ages that buying online is safe, comfortable and even rewarding. And printed products, although more complex and full of customisation and creativity, do not seem to be an exception. The first fledgling phenomena of online print sales go back to the 1990s, but it is only in the last decade that such sales have really taken on significant size, as large players progressively raise the bar in their services and investments and disproportionately broaden their product portfolio, their range of ancillary services, also the geographical reach. All this to the point whereby both the large national operators – those still without an online store, of course – and the thousands of small local print-service providers are all wondering how appropriate it is to enter an already crowded, mature arena.

The shop shelf is tough won territory and brands of all sizes are keen to stand out. So what are their plans for maximum impact and how can flexo help them win? When Colombian Natalia Welch went to launch her UK-based food start-up, Pura Panela, in 2015, she faced a problem: it wasn’t just her brand that was unknown in the UK, but the product itself. Back home in Colombia, panela was ubiquitous. You could buy it straight from farms in plain plastic bags. But in the UK it meant nothing. Worse: panela is Latin America’s natural and healthy sugar cane-based alternative, and sugar is a category with a distinctly unsavory reputation among UK consumers. So how could Natalia get this unknown product the attention it needed on crowded shelves, and tell shoppers it was different?

By Simon Eccles

Customers who have special house colours like to have them reproduced exactly the same everywhere. This tends to be a particularly big issue in digital packaging and label production, but it also matters for corporate work such as brochures and company reports which may be printed by general-purpose commercial printers. However, unless you tell it otherwise, a digital front end (DFE) /RIP will output each spot colour as a separate colour. If your press doesn’t have a spot colour facility, these need to be converted to process colours at some point in prepress. Nearly any DFE can take named spot colours (usually referenced by Pantone numbers), look them up in a table, and output separations as combinations of the printer’s own process colours – normally CMYK but sometimes with five, six or even seven colours.

By Graeme Richardson-Locke

Standing on the brink of a new decade, a predictable host of articles are flooding the business media, assessing the tech trends likely to reshape our ways of working.

One topic that surfaces wherever I look is automation. Research company Gartner even goes as far as putting ‘hyperautomation’ in first place in its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 analysis, saying that “hyperautomation refers not only to the breadth of the pallet of tools, but also to all the steps of automation itself (discover, analyse, design, automate, measure, monitor and reassess).”

Automation isn’t new. The print sector has been harnessing process automation enthusiastically over the last 20 years, with clear benefits for productivity and reduced time-to-market. But speciality printers served by FESPA have arguably been slower to embrace the potential.

By Jennifer Nesbitt

Every screen printer wants to create durable stencils that don’t degrade over the course of a print run. Stencils that soften or break down during long press runs or when used with water-based inks can slow production and lead to misprints and waste. To combat this, many screen printers turn to post-exposure. That is, exposing screens coated in photosensitive emulsion to more UV light after they have been exposed and washed out. But does post-exposure really increase stencil durability? How can you take advantage of post-exposure to create more durable screen printing stencils?