Wallpaper* magazine gets personal with its readers thanks to HP Indigo customisation.

Challenge

• Wallpaper* magazine wanted a creative way to make the cover of its handmade-themed August issue complement the custom made products featured in it.
• Wallpaper* publishing director Gord Ray and art director Meirion Pritchard sought a way to let readers design their own covers that met the magazine’s high standards.

Numerous designers, singular quality

For this project, the international design magazine commissioned unique, handmade items—everything from a sculptural watering can to a custom coffee blend to designs for an apartment building that’s also an urban farm. The staff paired designers with manufacturers to give both a chance to stretch their abilities. It only made sense to extend that collaborative spirit to the magazine’s readers.

Pritchard commissioned five graphic artists to design a palette of images, patterns, textures and words. On Wallpaper*’s website, readers could then combine elements from that palette to design their own covers for the August issue.

The ability to customise the covers was a perfect fit for the handmade-themed issue, and the HP Indigo 7000 delivered the exceptional print quality Wallpaper* is known for. The bulk of the magazine was printed on a traditional offset press and then bound with the digitally printed covers.

“We did a few tests using the HP Indigo, and the quality was amazing,” says Pritchard. “We compared covers we had printed traditionally with the digital prints, and there was no difference in quality.”

Solution

• F E Burman used an HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press to print 22,000 unique custom covers, including back cover ads for a high profile advertiser, with outstanding print quality.
• The HP SmartStream Production Pro Server handled the high volume of data and large files.
• The August 2010 issue of Wallpaper* has received incredibly positive feedback from readers, advertisers, industry press and beyond.
• Wallpaper* staff are already dreaming up further ways to apply custom digital printing to future issues.

More than ink on paper

Michael Burman, managing director at F E Burman, says the 50-year-old company has a long history of working with top magazines. F E Burman was one of the first companies in the UK to offer digital print capabilities, and it added the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press to its line up in 2008.

“The HP Indigo 7000 gives us the quality that enables it to match, and in some cases produce better quality, than heat-set web offset, with which Wallpaper* is typically printed,” says Burman. “This project would not have been as effective two to three years ago, before this latest technology.”

Burman uses the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press for versioned print jobs like Wallpaper*’s handmade issue and for everything from personalised mass membership campaigns to short-run jobs like invitations, menus and event materials. He says there’s no question that the new press has helped grow his business, even as clients tightened budgets in response to the economic recession.

“We’re increasingly seeing that print is becoming a commodity, so we need to offer other services beyond ink on paper to add value. Our expertise in a new solution like this helps provide customers with something different. Since we added the HP Indigo 7000, the average number of clicks per month has quadrupled.”

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