PVO provides more than 19,500 precise vehicle templates hand-measured to within a quarter-inch accuracy, and the PVO template collection now includes new and redesigned models from major auto and truck manufacturers, such as the Ford Lightning, the GMC Sierra, the Ford F600, the Toyota Tundra, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Jeep Wagoneer and the Dodge Durango.

PVO templates are suitable for wrap design, as well as for creating accurate estimates and proofs. The provehiclesoutlines.com online subscription service is an effective way to access the latest templates.

“PVO has always offered a comprehensive selection of vehicle templates and we pride ourselves on staying up to date with new vehicle models,” said Mike Chramtchenko, director of new business development for Fiery. “The precision and comprehensive nature of our wrap software template offerings makes Fiery Pro Vehicle Outlines much more than a simple design library. Thanks to its ability to significantly streamline the estimating and design process, this is an indispensable production tool for any business that produces and installs vehicle and fleet graphics.”

Suitable for floor applications, the two overlaminates provide clear protection or textured protection, respectively, to graphics printed not only for floors, but also windows, worktops, displays, and wallcoverings. GuardLam Glossy Floor Overlaminate is a 4-mil optically clear film that adds a smooth sheen and protects printed output, while also incorporating anti-slip properties. GuardLam Embossed Floor Overlaminate, a 6-mil film, delivers “outstanding” protection as well, while also adding non-slip grip and stability.

To be named a winner, projects must have used Avery Dennison vehicle wrap products, such as Supreme Wrapping Film or MPI 1105, to wrap a four-wheel passenger vehicle.

Spiderghini took the team one week to design, and one week to install. The intent of the project, according to the company’s entry form, was to emulate Spider-Man’s Iron Spider suit design from the movie Avengers: Endgame, because the team describes itself as “huge Spider-Man fans”.

The base colour of the car was white at the start of the project. The hood and roof were embossed in order to register the webbing and logos with the printer layer. The classic Spider-Man logo was also embossed on the back of the car. Sapphire Creative used Avery Dennison Supreme Wrapping Film in Gloss White to emboss, and Supreme Wrapping Film in Diamond White for the digital print layout, along with DOL1360Z clear, high gloss laminate.

“We wanted to build a design that was both relevant for today as well as easily recognizable,” explains Jeremie Webber, president of Sapphire Creative and member of the project team. “Having the design stand out by standing close to the car as well as having it stand out from a distance was one of our main goals. To do this, we had to make sure our general layout design was simple enough with a strong contrast of colours so that visually you could see and understand the artwork from 10 to 20 feet away from the car but also have some serious wow factor when you got up close and personal.”

Photo: Sapphire Creative.

In order to achieve this, the team printed the graphics on the Avery Diamond SW900 series so the prints would have a heavy metallic finish. In order to give the wrap some depth, the team laid down a cut vinyl layer of the webbing on the car prior to placing the wrap, so when the car was wrapped, the webbing would have an embossed look and feel.

According to Webber, the major difficulty in the design of the project (in addition to actually building it) was taking a design concept that had been custom designed for the human body, and redesigning it to fit a Lamborghini.

“[We had] questions like ‘how do we made a design like this compliment the body shape of the car itself? How thick should the webbing be? How should the webbing curve around the body of the car? Where to place the iconic logos?’ This process took our designers multiple revisions and edits to get the layout exactly how we wanted it before print production was started,” notes Webber. “[We had] multiple revisions to make sure the webbing curved around the body lines of the car just the way we wanted, and making sure the Spider-Man symbols worked with the body of the car.”

Despite any challenges involved in the design, Sapphire Creative is grateful for both the experience and the exposure of the contest.

“Winning the Wrap Like a King contest for Canada helps set us apart as a company. It is not an award that is easy to win and each year the entries are getting better and more creative from every company that enters,” says Webber. “It shows our potential clients that they can trust our work and that our staff is more than capable to handle any of their wrap needs.”

This article was originally published in the 2020 Wide Format Guide. Click here to check it out.

“The Albany airport staff was a pleasure to work with,” said David Kile, director of systems integrations at SNA Displays. “The information and technology leadership really understood what we needed to get done and was there to help and advise every step of the way.”

SNA Displays provided the LED displays, content management system, and ceiling-mounted metal enclosures to match the original design. All 10 displays, from the company’s BOLD interior product line, are 26 feet, six inches long and just under a foot high. Employing a pixel pitch of 2.5 mm, each LED ribbon display has a resolution of 3,200 pixels wide by 90 pixels high.

SNA Displays worked with Color-Ad, who provided audio-visual integration and installation services, and Crystal McKenzie, who provided design expertise.

The first and oldest municipal airport in the U.S., Albany International Airport serves as the major air centre for the Capital Region, Northeastern New York, and Western New England.

Xhenis Levack, Primoprint’s CEO, purchased the building – which is located next door to the compnay’s existing offices – in late 2019 and has already started renovations of the space, which previously served as a medical office. The renovations are scheduled to be completed at the end of Spring 2020, with a grand opening planned for later in the year. Once completed, the renovations will accommodate the company’s future growth, adding additional square footage to the 4,500-square-foot building.

Under Ms. Levack’s leadership, the company said in a March 20 statement, Primoprint has sustained 20 per cent year-over-year growth and added ten new employees.

Featuring advanced adhesive technology, the new products – MACmark 9800 PRO B-free and 9800 PRO High-Tack – are designed to make graphic application of high-performance permanent marking applications easy.

“Our new MACmark 9800 PRO products feature two different, highly advanced Mactac adhesive innovations, delivering Mactac customers even more potential with opportunities for added growth and new business,” Amanda Smith, Mactac’s associate product manager, said in a press release.

MACmark 9800 PRO B-free was developed using Mactac’s bubble-free air-egress adhesive technology, which is said to offer ease of installation. MACmark 9800 PRO High-Tack features a very aggressive adhesive that is geared specifically for tough-to-stick-to applications.

The adhesives are paired with a 2.6-mil heavy metal-free calendared vinyl, which touts durability, UV resistance, and conformability over difficult surfaces, such as rivets and those with gloss and matte finishes. The films offer REACH regulation compliance for environmental concerns. The films are supported with 83# and 90# bleached white Kraft liners for added stability and layflat.

MACmark 9800 PRO B-free and 9800 PRO High-Tack are available in white and black constructions and offer outdoor durability of up to 8-10 years. Typical applications include vehicle/fleet marking, decorative panels, window graphics, and shipping containers.

MACmark Marking Films are designed for plotting and computer-aided decoration and signage.

Charlie Brown.

The Foil & Specialty Effects Association (FSEA) has named printing and foil stamping industry veteran Charlie Brown as the recipient of its 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Brown is the owner and co-founder of Phoenix, Ariz.-based die maker Metal Magic.

With college degrees in chemistry and electrical engineering, along with a reputation for being able to fix any mechanical problem, Brown started Metal Magic in 1988 with a US$10,000 loan from his father. He originally operated his new company in the back of the Arizona Embossing building. Only six months later, Metal Magic moved into its own building and hired its first employee, who is still with the company today.

Metal Magic quickly became known throughout the country as a leader in copper die manufacturing. That nationwide reputation rapidly increased the company’s demand for quality copper dies, and just five years after setting up shop in its own building, Brown purchased a new manufacturing plant to enable future growth.

The FSEA Lifetime Achievement Award is bestowed on one individual every two years, honouring professionals in the foil stamping and embossing industry who have made significant contributions to the advancement of the industry at large. Nominations for the recipient of this award are submitted by FSEA members. From those nominations, a committee comprised of past FSEA presidents make the final honouree selection.

Brown will be honoured at the FSEA Gold Leaf Awards event on April 28, 2020, in conjunction with the 2020 FSEA·IADD Joint Conference. The 2020 FSEA·IADD Joint Conference will take place April 27-29 at the Hyatt Regency Downtown Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The first version of the solution is designed to create complex security and embellishment designs for label and packaging printing. The goal, they say, is not only to protect digital prints from counterfeiting, but also to improve their aesthetic appearance and shelf appeal as designer creativity can be elevated to give a high-end look to digitally printed packages, labels or documents, with security embedded in the design itself.

The solution will be launched in the coming months and made available to HP Indigo customers via HP PrintOS Marketplace.

“The expansion of the HP Indigo secure print portfolio with Agfa design software capabilities adds a powerful option for brands, security printers and authorities to help combat the growing threat of counterfeiting, leveraging the high print quality and digital agility of HP Indigo presses, with the confidence of having both HP and Agfa behind them,” says Alon Bar-Shany, General Manager, HP Indigo.

“On the one hand, brands are looking to take packaging and labels to the next level by adding creativity and giving them a more luxurious appearance. On the other hand, digital printing is on the verge of a breakthrough for general security applications. Agfa’s security and brand protection software suite and HP’s digital printing solutions combine into the perfect offering,” adds Andy Grant, Head of Software Agfa.

Features of the new swatch book include:

• 2-inch x 2-inch loose format poly swatches dyed in 100-percent warp knit polyester
• Removable swatches for easy colour selection and palette development
• Colours arranged chromatically by colour family
• Visualization of 35 colours on each binder page

As new markets highlighting engineered materials continue to emerge and new inorganic materials enter the market, there is an increasing desire for more saturated colours, Pantone explains. Serving as a companion to the Pantone Fashion, Home + Interiors cotton products, the new Fashion, Home + Interiors Polyester Swatch Book addresses this market demand for a deeper level of colouration; displaying a colour depth best achieved with a non-cotton based textile dyed system. Creating a special system of colours using dyes specifically for polyester removes the guesswork and enhances product speed to market by enabling quick and accurate reproduction of these colours in polyester as well as other synthetic fibres, Pantone notes.

With 203 unique colours for designers and colourists working in apparel, textiles and soft home, Pantone’s Polyester Swatch Book aims to support designers through their workflow and increase speed to market.

New apps in the marketplace from HP and solution partners can also help print service providers increase productivity, streamline workflow and develop new digital print applications, it explains, and can give users control over print operations from virtually anywhere at any time, simplifying and automating print production processes.

More than 50 free projects and design tools are now available for download exclusively for PSPs using PrintOS. Resources in the new PrintOS Marketplace ideas store include projects-in-a-box for labels and packaging, commercial and photo printing. Ready-to-go projects include HP Mosaic and HP Collage packaging templates, seed patterns, sample files, and royalty-free images and icons. Members are also invited to share or sell their print ideas in the store.

PrintOS has grown to more than 20,000 users since launching at drupa 2016.

Designed to accompany a one-semester course on web design, the book can be read online or downloaded in ePub and PDF versions from https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/webdesign. Printed versions can also be ordered from the site. The eBook has been published under a Creative Commons “Share and Share Alike with Attribution” copyright license, enabling other instructors to download, edit and use the book for their classes, royalty-free, the only requirement being to credit the original authors. The eBook was written on the Library’s Pressbooks publishing platform. It can be output in several formats, including online, .epub (tablets), .mobi (Amazon Kindle), .pdf, and print.

The Library explains students typically like open-source eBooks because they are free, cover material only relevant to the class, and easy to access online without going to a bookstore or library stacks.

Quark DesignPad is the app developed by Quark Software to help creative iPad users explore design, concept ideas and start projects on their tablet, such as posters, postcards, advertisements, invitations, brochures, business cards or newsletters. Once created, the designs can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, by email, printed, exported as print ready PDF or saved to Box or Dropbox. Users can also optionally export the designs as native QuarkXPress files for further refinement directly in QuarkXPress.

The updated Quark DesignPad 3.0 has been redesigned for iOS 11 and with the new version users have access to:

• Layout Painter: Sketch layouts by using intelligent “box style brushes” then turn them into finished designs
• Snap to Guides: Helps keep boxes aligned to guides as you move or create them
• Line Shapes with Dash: Add plain rules to your designs
• Various Fixes and Updates: Updated Dropbox support and fixed known issues
• UI and Performance Update: New polish and colour schemes and better experience on iPad Pro

The basic version of Quark DesignPad is a free download from the iTunes store. Professional users can opt to unlock the Pro Feature Pack for access to professional output and sharing capabilities for $9.99. The additional features let users save and share print-quality PDFs; save PNG, Adobe PDF and native QuarkXPress file format versions to Box and DropBox for immediate access anywhere; or print with AirPrint support.

Called Taopix.ai, the new AI-enriched version will select the best and most relevant photos to be used, then construct stories from those images, and present the images in a way that coveys logic and emotion, the company explains. It is designed to analyze images based on quality, location, frequency and the presence of a range of different subjects. Face detection and recognition is a key part of the solution, but Taopix.ai will also recognize food, drinks, locations, environments, events and situations.

Taopix.ai has been built in an exclusive partnership with Muvee in Singapore. It will be formally launched at Photokina in Cologne later this month and will be available for pre-ordering at the show and thereafter. Taopix.ai is scheduled to be released in Q1 2019.

James Gray, CEO and Founder at Taopix, says the firm has been looking into AI, primarily as a means to make photo book creation easier and quicker, for a number of years.

“It has taken quite some time to find a technology that is right for the job and can reliably build books using AI. Building the books automatically and quickly is one thing, but the books have to be beautiful and meaningful as well,” Gray says.

“The photo book sector suffers from an alarming metric. Seventy percent of all photo book projects started are never completed. The value of the photo book market worldwide is estimated at $4 billion. If 70 percent of all projects started are left unfinished, that would indicate that there is a significant amount of money being left on the table. It’s widely believed that the most significant factors at the heart of this worrying statistic are the time and the effort it takes to make a photo book. While for some this is a worthwhile pastime, for many others it appears to put them off finishing the projects they have started,” according to a press statement from Taopix.

The Mediaclip Photoshop Extension supports a range of graphic elements, such as strokes, monogram, embellishments as well as static elements that help users manage licensed content. According to Mediaclip, the extension enables several designers to create new content simultaneously and allows both print and web versions of graphic assets to be exported directly into a Mediaclip-ready format that can be used right away.

Working with the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud, the extension was improved with several new features that make it more flexible in terms of design functionalities and optimize the connectivity between the extension and other components of the Mediaclip environment, the company explains.

Pantone continues to explain: “Weightless and airy, like the expanse of the blue sky above us, Serenity (PANTONE 15-3919) comforts with a calming effect, bringing feelings of respite and relaxation even in turbulent times. Rose Quartz (PANTONE 13-1520) is a persuasive yet gentle tone that conveys compassion and a sense of composure.

Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, said: “With the whole greater than its individual parts, joined together Serenity and Rose Quartz demonstrate an inherent balance between a warmer embracing rose tone and the cooler tranquil blue, reflecting connection and wellness as well as a soothing sense of order and peace,” said Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute.

Pantone states the prevalent combination of Serenity and Rose Quartz also challenges some more traditional perceptions around colour association. “In many parts of the world we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has in turn impacted colour trends throughout all other areas of design,” said Eiseman. “This more unilateral approach to colour is coinciding with societal movements toward gender equality and fluidity, the consumers’ increased comfort with using colour as a form of expression which includes a generation that has less concern about being typecast or judged, and an open exchange of digital information that has opened our eyes to different approaches to colour usage.”

Serenity and Rose Quartz, explains Pantone, are also a popular choice for jewelry and fashion accessories, including handbags, hats, footwear and wearable technology. The company states it is also an ideal choice for rugs and upholstery, working well in paint and for decorative accessories.

For 16 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design. Past selections for Color of the Year include:

    PANTONE 18-1438 Marsala (2015)
    PANTONE 18-3224 Radiant Orchid (2014)
    PANTONE 17-5641 Emerald (2013)
    PANTONE 17-1463 Tangerine Tango (2012)
    PANTONE 18-2120 Honeysuckle (2011)
    PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise (2010)
    PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa (2009)
    PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris (2008)
    PANTONE 19-1557 Chili Pepper (2007)
    PANTONE 13-1106 Sand Dollar (2006)
    PANTONE 15-5217 Blue Turquoise (2005)
    PANTONE 17-1456 Tigerlily (2004)
    PANTONE 14-4811 Aqua Sky (2003)
    PANTONE 19-1664 True Red (2002)
    PANTONE 17-2031 Fuchsia Rose (2001)
    PANTONE 15-4020 Cerulean (2000)

The first, Affinity Designer, was launched in October last year (reviewed by Zac Bolan in PrintAction’s February 2015 issue, More Vector, Less Money).

Affinity Photo was originally launched as a public beta in February (culminating in over 230,000 downloads), including capabilities such as RAW processing, PSD import and export, 16-bits per channel editing, and ICC colour management.

The release version of the app features a full set of tools for professional processing, including camera lens and exposure corrections, accurate adjustments, live filter layers, controls for channels and masks, advanced layer handling, and built-in frequency separation editing.

Serif also promotes its speed, explaining whether working on a 100-megapixel image or a complex composition with thousands of layers, a user can still pan and zoom at 60 fps and see live views of all adjustments, brushes, blend modes and filters with no compromise.

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/adobeconnect/pdfs/web-conferencing/universal-voice-wp-final.pdf