Based on a two year period covering their exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery the book uses artworks, conversations, writings, workshops and films to challenge perceived ideas on art and disability.

Officially launched on 16/09/2010 at The Whitechapel Gallery, the book is printed on Challenger Matt FSC paper, using vegetable oil-based biodegradable ink and casebound with a very tactile soft-touch laminate.

Invitation to the launch of See The Revolutionary Art Exhibit

If you look at a piece of print under an eyeglass you’ll see that printed images are made up of (half-tone) dots. These dots will have been generated using a traditonal AM screening process whereas Stochastic (or FM) screening randomly generates very small dots to give the appearance of a continuous tone photograph.

The benefits of stochastic screening – improved colour consistency and greater depth of colour saturation – really need to be seen on paper to be appreciated.

Therefore, for a limited period, Calverts is offering stochastic printing as standard. If you feel that your images could do with a bit more oomph and pop, please get in touch.

Palmer uses estimates of the carbon cost of producing e-readers to say that, compared with books, they ‘pay for themselves’ at between the 18th and 23rd read (of an average text by an average reader). The figures exclude the carbon costs of building and running e-bookstore’s servers and the power to operate the hardware, as well as the cost of safe decommissioning and disposal. Palmer doesn’t say what metrics he’s using for the carbon cost of a book, but reading between the lines it’s assumed that paper is made from 100% virgin fibre and the inks used to print it mineral oil based, with high levels of volatile and toxic organic compounds. The comparison also seems to assume books are only read once.

We won’t waste any more time on ‘piece of string’ carbon comparisons. The question is: who benefits from this genre of pseudo-scientific analysis? The paper industry is as guilty of greenwash as any – just have a look at the mixture of truth and damned statistics deployed by Two Sides, the European papermakers’ campaign, to bolster their green credentials. On the other side of the argument, Mandy Haggith, author of Paper Trails: from Trees to Trash – the True Cost of Paper (reviewed here) - has said she thinks paper and print have the potential to become sustainable sooner than any other commodity manufacturing industry. Well-managed, farmed timber for papermaking is a sustainable resource – although Europe and the US still need to halve their consumption of paper and double their recycling rates (paper can be recycled up to 9 times). When will the electronics industry desist from mining non-renewables like lithium and columbite-tantalite, or stop building server farms that consume the power of medium-sized cities? 

Calverts halved the volume of paper it processed in 10 years. All the paper we now buy on our clients’ behalf is made from post-consumer recycled, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified and other controlled sources of wood pulp. We use Bio vegetable oil based inks, and power our operations using 100% renewable energy. How did we do this without putting ourselves out of a job? By working with clients to design and print smarter and better – shorter print runs, more carefully targeted (no junk print), higher value and lower volume, more efficient use of industrial capacity. It’s not rocket science. We don’t even claim to be the greenest printers in the world.

Anti-print pundits only use the inane phrase ‘dead trees’ when they’re talking about paper. Would they talk about ‘dead flowers’ to talk about cotton, or ‘dead tubers’ to talk about root vegetables? Just as silly is the argument that e-communication is just ‘pushing electrons’, whereas making paper from trees is ‘moving carbon atoms around’ and therefore self-evidently bad. What’s really being revealed is a self-serving fetishisation of new products. This kind of stuff suits electronics manufacturers and gadget-obsessed media pundits alike.

When it comes to visual and graphic designers, the denigration of paper-based reading coincides with the decline of typographic knowledge in both the design schools and agencies. Many young designers seem terrified of the prospect of having to work in a medium as revealing and demanding as print. Correcting a mistake or hiding a design booboo in a print job is more complicated than tweaking a web page. Perhaps what they’re really frightened of is revealing a lack of knowledge in a medium that tends to stick around.

Another thought: print phobia doesn’t seem to apply to just-obsolete or craft based techniques like letterpress, which are enjoying a niche renaissance. There’s snobbery involved – something to do with white vs. blue collar, craft vs. graft, and the vain struggle against the proletarianisation of designers.

Perhaps the creative industries neophytes of 2020, when digital print has achieved hegemony, will be indulging in nostalgia about the sheer sensuality of litho, while buying clapped-out Heidelbergs to put in their basements and salivating online over their latest resource-hungry, slave labour manufactured gizmos. We hope not.

We’ve identified paper described over the phone as “toothy”, tracked down suppliers of biodegradable wiro-binding, and investigated modern methods to replicate arcane print techniques.

We like a challenge and we usually come up with a solution.

Recently we were commissioned to print a book, or rather to reprint it as the book had been published twice before, once in German and again in French. We were given the original artwork files with translated text + a hard copy of the first edition and a brief to reproduce it, exactly as the original.

At a glance, the book – heavily illustrated with large areas of flat graphics in spot colours – appears to have been litho printed using a traditional screening method. Under an eyeglass however, there is almost a continuous tone running through the images which suggests stochastic screening has been used. There’s also some surface picking on one particular colour which indicates a high ink tack – further evidence of stochastic screening due to the thinner film of ink required in this process.

But there is a slight dot in there and this dot, however subtle, points to another screening or output method.

We know the original artist/author liked to experiment, having etched an entire illustrated book directly onto film, so it’s not unreasonable to think the artist has created some strange  hand-screening hybrid.

To further complicate matters, the German printer of the first edition appears not to have a website or any contact details at all so we can’t ask the right questions to the right people.

We won’t rest until we will find them and what it is they’ve done to bend the laws of print.

Here’s a new set of marks, developed by Calverts for the UK’s co-operative trade association and campaigning body.

We’ve almost finished a new visual identity for Co-operatives UK. Brand extension includes print, website, display and enews communications, plus design and collateral for the first ever Co-ops Fortnight, which ran from 19 June – 3 July. It’s been a rollercoaster, but also very gratifying to be able to put our creative and productive capacity behind the business and social movement we’re part of. We’re waiting on research which should show how much we actually raised awareness of the sector among the public, business and government - but people are telling inspired stories, so fingers crossed it will be proved a worthwhile investment.

In addition to the Fortnight campaign website, Calverts designed and produced a bulletin, information pack, badges, stickers and leaflets. We also created formats and layouts for the New Insights and Thinkpiece series of pamphlets, the Co-operative Call to Action and the 2010 Review of the Co-operative Economy, which shows how co-ops are taking market share and growing quickly in a number of areas. Heady stuff.

You can download an ever-expanding list of publications, including the brilliant and provocative pamphlet series from the likes of Ed Mayo, Carey Oppenheim and Dave Boyle, here – or you can email news@calverts.coop for one of a limited number of copies, expertly printed with vegetable oil based inks on Paperback’s Context FSC (75% recycled) papers.

Lee Donghyun and Lee HyoJeong of the Recycling Federation of Social Solidarity Enterprise, and Ladeok Koo of the Korea Computer Refurbish Centre, were accompanied by Hyung Sik Eum, who is working with with the European worker co-op network, CECOP.

We were able to offer our guests some insights into the situation for worker co-operative startups in the UK, and found strong parallels between the UK and Korean context – particularly, difficulty with finding startup capital, a steep learning curve in terms of management skills among the co-op’s founder members,  and the prejudice of potential backers in favour of the company (rather than co-operative) model. Our guests were particularly interested in how we found strength in co-operation – the powerful formula of member ownership, member control and member benefit – to overcome those early problems.

The group was especially interested in Calverts environmental policy, practice and accreditations, including FSC and ISO 14001, and our efforts to find a sustainable and co-operative supply chain for recycled and FSC certified papers.

A  factory, studio and office tour were followed by Fair Trade coffee and chocolate biscuits, which melted in the heat and humidity of Calverts small south-facing meeting room.

The group has a hectic schedule of visits. Yesterday they went to a worker co-operative run community recycling scheme in Bristol, this morning they were at Paperback recycled paper co-operative, and tomorrow they fly to Brussels for more fact finding about European worker co-ops and environmental businesses.

Thanks to the four of you for your interest in what we do here at Calverts, and especially for the gift of three traditional Korean fans, which will be pressed into action immediately. We hope the rest of your tour is fruitful, and wish you every success.

This was the subject of debate at yesterday’s Institute of Business Ethics annual discussion, at the very smart premises of the Royal Overseas Society. Four panellists, including Martin Le Jeune of Open Road, Robert Phillips, CEO of Edelman UK (Edelman is the world’s largest PR agency) and Sir Kevin Tebbit of Finmeccanica UK, spoke for 5 minutes each, followed by a Q&A session. The 38% figure, by the way, comes from Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer and represents a proportion of the ‘informed public’ (i.e. the richest and best educated quarter of the population) in the UK, France and Germany.

While most of the speakers defended business and business ethics as such, and agreed that public opinion does indeed matter, our panellist outlined the extent to which people might consider that it doesn’t.

‘The public’ is by definition an undifferentiated mass, the subject of polls. Nobody really thinks of themselves as ‘a member of the public’: it is an affectless, powerless and passive entity. Its opinion therefore doesn’t matter. Also, ‘the public’ is well known for lying, or for acting in contradiction its stated views.

When the undifferentiated public starts to resolve itself into interest groups, its views start to count. In pressing those overlapping and often conflicting interests – as employees, consumers, voters, activists, parents, children and so on – people cease to be ‘the public’. Their views still don’t impact on business as such, but they do have an effect on individual businesses. Workers withdraw their labour (or work harder), consumers boycott products (or buy them in a frenzy), activists campaign against companies, and so on – although notably, voters don’t get to vote for or against business as such, because democratic parties are in favour of it. China, where about 66% of the ‘informed public’ thinks that both business and government are trustworthy, has been experiencing a wave of strikes for the last three months.

Business – the pursuit of a return on capital, through trading – is always business, and in one sense all business is business as usual.  It can do, or not do, anything it likes within the law. What it can’t do is fail to go after and make profits, and then make profits from the profits. This is true regardless of the motives and ethics of the people running businesses, be they worker co-ops, social enterprises, ethical cosmetics firms, oil companies or derivatives trading houses. The true ethic of business is that whatever is good for business is good. Other considerations fall by the wayside when the freedom to generate return on capital is threatened. So, it doesn’t matter what the public thinks about business, because in this respect business cannot change. Because we all depend on work and purchasing power to live, we find it hard to imagine a world without business. 

There’s something in every business that would quite like not to have to deal with the public at all.  In fact, some of the most innovative firms in recent years worked out a way of making money, and making money from money, without doing anything at all except trading money derivatives. 

Of course, if the behaviour of business became truly egregious, public opinion might matter. If, for instance, business decided to loot the economy and then force ‘the public’ to foot the bill through big cuts in the social wage, ‘the public’ might turn green, rip its shirt and mutate into its alter ego, the mob – and withdraw its consent for business full stop. It’s happened before.

This post is a personal view from Sion Whellens

Printing plates will have been made by this stage so  it could be expensive to make sweeping changes to approved artwork but press-passing does offer a cost-effective opportunity to check colour reproduction on the actual paper stock.

Please be aware that colour can only be adjusted in tracks parallel to the direction in which the sheet comes off the press. So if you were to increase the cyan (for example) in a picture at the grip edge of the sheet then everything that follows behind that on the sheet will also be affected. It’s easier to see this on press than explain it here so why not give us a call, an email, or even a job to show you what we mean!

Press-passing decisions should be made quite quickly. The press is already running and costs will be based on uninterrupted print production

While we do try to give accurate time-slots for clients to press-pass their work occasionally there may be a little bit of a wait. We’ll try to entertain you as best we can but if you should get bored, hungry, or both then Eddies Café, just around the corner from us on Mare Street, comes highly recommended…

Photo by Emily Webber www.londonshopfronts.com

FOHS are hoping to commission a series of posters by Hackney-based artists, designers and photographers so please get in touch if you’d like to know more.

An A2 size abstract pattern was printed in three spot colours on sheets of 320gsm Cairn Natural 100% recycled board left over from a previously printed job – no need to purchase and transport paper.

The imposition – method in which individual pages are placed on a larger printed sheet – was such that up to eight unique cover designs could be achieved from a single artwork (minimising waste on the sheet by keeping to a trimmed size of A6, which is appropriate for an A2 untrimmed sheet). *Designers need to know about imposition, because along with a basic understanding of printing press formats, they can use imposition knowhow to cut both the financial and the environmental costs of paper and print.

The inner pages of the notebook were a selection of recycled papers which had been sitting on the shelf. These were left unprinted and  collated randomly throughout the notebook.

The plates used to print the notebook cover were produced on a processless CTP system dispensing with the need for chemical developer and water.

The inks used were vegetable oil based and biodegradable.

The printing process itself was powered by renewable energy, and by using recycled paper (made from post consumer waste which would otherwise have gone to landfill) 137kg of carbon was saved.

Get creative + print sustainably. Contact Calverts on 020 7739 1474
or email: info@calverts.coop