Today we heard that Calverts is among the first 20 fully accredited companies in the SEE (Social, Environmental and Ethical Transparency) programme.
SEE is a labelling scheme and social business movement that aims to change the world for good. To display the SEE logo, businesses must be transparent and accountable. We underwent a comprehensive evaluation of Calverts performance, and you can read, respond and rate our answers to thirty five questions covering Community impacts, Corporate Governance, Donations and Payments, the Environment, Human Rights, Marketplace Ethics and Workforce standards on the SEE website.
We first got interested in the SEE concept four years ago, when we heard its indefatigable founder, Michael Solomons, pitch the idea to an audience of investors, business academics and students at the Cass Business School. They didn’t get the concept, but we certainly did. SEE is a measure of transparency and honesty, enabling clients and the public to make truly informed purchasing decisions. We saw straight away how it could be the antidote to all those mystifying environmental management and accountability labels – EMAS, AA2000, Investors in People and so on – and at the same time allow us to develop authentic management tools, share best practice and benchmark ourselves against similiar organisations. If you’re interested to know how we answered questions ranging from how much corporation tax we paid last year, to our policy on carbon offsetting, to our practice on employee consultation or promoting diversity, click here.
If you’d like to know more about the kind of work – and how much – Calverts had to do to become SEE accredited, please get in touch.
You may or may not know that Calverts is a co-operative, which means the company is co-owned by our creative and production teams. For 32 years, we’ve successfully managed the business by democratic consensus. The co-op ethos of respect, service and equality is expressed in our relationships with clients, who often testify to the benefits of working with an agency that’s genuinely open, ethical and accountable.
Earlier this week, David Cameron’s Conservatives said they intend to turn large parts of the welfare state – everything from schools to care homes to NHS bodies - into worker co-ops! Within hours of the policy announcement, a Channel 4 News team arrived at our place in Bethnal Green, wanting to have a look at a real life co-operative and get our views on the Cameron policy. You can see the resulting pictures and interview 1:38 mins into the video below.
Needless to say, the Calverts team would be delighted to help the new Cameron co-ops with their rebranding, from honing their public service messages to designing their websites and printing their annual reports. We were really looking forward to pitching to the Metropolitan Police, where we could help them use the top level co-operative internet domain extension, .coop, and register a new domain for them – londoncop.coop, perhaps? Then we found out that the police and armed services are among the services which will not be eligible for co-operative status. Shame.
Building on the hullaballoo, Calverts is also published in today’s Daily Telegraph (about 11th letter down on the web page), where we explain why David Cameron’s misconception about co-operatives puts him in danger of being seen as the heir of Joseph Stalin.
Radical seventeenth century publishers during the English Civil war, purveyors of ’soul-poysons’, members of the sect My One Flesh, imprisoned for printing books such as Richard Overton’s The last warning to all the inhabitants of London and Lawrence Clarkson’s ‘impious and blasphemous’ book A single eye – all light, no darkness, the Calverts operated from their print shop at the Sign of the Black Spread Eagle* at the west end of St Paul’s Churchyard in London…download PDF for more.
We haven’t exactly been inundated with emails identifying these mystery objects.
They are, of course, hickey pickers, which are hand tools used by printers to remove the minute particles of hard ink or paper fibre which can sometimes work their way onto the surface of a lithographic printing plate or blanket while the press is running. These blemishes – or hickeys – can result in a ‘bullseye’ (or ‘doughnut’ if you’re American) appearing on the printed sheet – basically a small uninked spot in the printed image.
Hickeys are widely considered to be imperfections. Part of the unholy alliance which also includes catch-up, scumming, showthrough, misregistration, poor fit and setoff – all designed to thwart the printer and aggrieve the client.
But does the much maligned hickey deserve such a bad press?
These days letterpress printing is admired for it tactile quality and the ‘bite’ it gives to the printed piece – yet in the past letterpress minders would go to great lengths to prevent ‘bite’, applying and removing layers of tissue paper to the underside of metal type in order to retain the smooth surface of the printed sheet. The debossed effect, or ‘bite’ which gives letterpress printing a unique characteristic was, back then, considered a flaw.
Hickeys today are thought of as flaws in the print process but such flaws, in rare doses, can add something unique to otherwise identical copies. The Inverted Jenny stamp and the Wicked Bible are result of errors in the printing process – errors that differentiated them, made them more desirable.
You don’t get ‘bite’ in lithographic printing and you don’t get hickeys in digital printing – so when digital printing eventually replaces litho (as litho replaced letterpress) will future afficionados of print ephemera think of hickeys in an entirely new light?
Calverts is descended from the design and print wing of the Arts Lab, back in the ’70s, but after all this time we still wonder sometimes if designers and printers will ever speak the same language. To test the waters, we recently asked: “what do designers mean, when they ask printers to make their images look punchy?”
No two designers gave the same answer, so is it any wonder we sometimes get misunderstandings? Vincent said that punchy means “great repro (on images) to make CMYK rich and full”. Our own Scumboni interpreted it as a request for “the sharpness and ink lift you get from printing on coated paper – but on uncoated”. Our favourite answer was from John Wallet, who reckons punchy means “like full colour, but with really vivid oranges and greens” – in other words, Hexachrome for the price of CMYK.
On reflection, we came to the conclusion that ‘punchiness’, like ‘richness’, is one of those qualities designers look for when they’re anxious that the job should really impress the client and look great in their portfolio. As WDLtd told us, it’s a bit like when a client asks a designer to ‘jazz it up a bit’ – in other words, imbue it with that little, difficult-to-define, something extra.
