Archive for June, 2009

Co-operatives Magazine Number 12

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

is rolling off the press and about to hit the streets. Calverts has been designing and printing ‘Co-operatives’, the flagship publication of Co-operatives UK, for a number of years. Aimed at opinion formers in and out of the co-op movement, it is published 3 times yearly. The current issue – on press as we write – will come out next week, ahead of the 2009 Co-operative Congress in Windsor.

Here’s the best thing: up till now, we’ve been printing the magazine with Bio vegetable oil based inks on FSC certified and recycled content silk coated papers which look (and perform) like virgin fibre papers for ‘corporate’ print. This time, the client has specified Paperback co-operative’s own Emerald FSC (150gsm and 200gsm), which is lick coated and made from 75% post-consumer recycled paper fibres, with 25% virgin fibre pulp from Forest Stewardship Council certified plantations. The aesthetics of this paper are interesting – it’s rather like Cyclus Print or Brand X, but has really good bulk and is ‘downshade’ from your normal corporate ‘white’ coated paper. Using Emerald doesn’t just demonstrate that our apex organisation is committed to intertrading between different co-ops (and by the way, it doesn’t cost more): it’s also the right paper from a communications design perspective, by subtly enhancing the magazine’s editorial position on about sustainable business. In other words, it shows they are ‘walking the talk’. And we like it, because it’s a paper with real person

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Print like it’s going out of Fashion

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Hot off the press, the Royal Academy Schools Show 2009 catalogue

Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio and printed at Calverts,  Royal Academy Schools Show 2009 was finished and delivered yesterday. Printed on traditional high white laid paper, with graphic sections on Challenger Matt Coated and cover on 300gsm Challenger White Uncoated board, this was a challenging piece of reprographics and print for a meticulous client. Combining fine line, typographic, colour halftone and full out solids, the book was produced in an edition of 2,500.
It’s been a busy June for London’s art and design schools, and therefore for Calverts print team, as they prepare for summer shows. Last week, we printed and bound the catalogue for the Kingston Fashion BA graduates, who will be showing as part of Graduate Fashion Week.
The Kingston book was designed and printed in an A5 landscape format on Emerald FSC matt/silk coated, 100% recycled paper. Emerald is an exclusive Paperback product, a true aesthetic recycled (in other words, it’s made from true deinked post-consumer waste, so it looks and feels recycled – it’s not trying to pretend it’s virgin fibre.) The inner pages were printed CMYK and sealer with our high performance Bio (linseed and soya oil) based litho inks; the covers on 2000  micron greyboard, also 100% recycled, with the titling printed as matt white hot foil – the technique chosen by the RCA for their summer show catalogue and invitations last year.
Very stylish indeed; contact us for samples.

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Simon Caulkin Axed at The Observer

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

“The management model that has run us for the last 30 years – like the discredited economic theories (rational expectations, efficient markets) – is bust, dead, finished”, says Simon Caulkin, in his last Management column in today’s Observer. And yet, it remains “a mortal danger to us and the planet”. Caulkin’s prophetic column has been axed as a cost-cutting measure after 16 years, and he doesn’t go gracefully – as he says, “the bankers have claimed another victim”. Apart from writing the most incisive management column in the UK press – he wasted no words – Caulkin’s is a first-rate bullshit detector. He has consistently critiqued flavour-of-the-decade management fads (including measure-and-manage, the obsession of government with targets and outputs, and hypocritical ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’), and he has championed worker co-operation, writing about successful employee-owned businesses such as John Lewis Partnership, Tullis Russell Papermakers and Arup. Caulkin promises a book soon – the observer’s book of management, although “regretably, and not of my doing, now without a capital ‘O’.”
Read his last, excoriating, column, in full.

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No Hens In the Pen!

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Secret Seed Society is a new children’s publisher. Calverts printed their first title.

Aimed at entertaining and educating early-years readers on growing and preparing vegetables, each title is printed at A6 and comes in a card wallet with a recipe, packet of seeds and stickers. Written by Jean Webster and illustrated by Valentina Cavallini, ‘No Hens in the Pen’ follows the adventures of Chrissie Cress and her best frind Peter Parsnip (yes, all of the characters are vegetables), as they search for the family’s errant chickens. SSS came to us via the Kept website, because they are looking for the most efficient and sustainable print and papers for the series; we recommended Cyclus Offset 150gsm for the booklets – CMYK throughout, printing with Bio vegetable oil inks on 100% post-consumer recycled uncoated – and for the wallets, a rough manilla board from the Cairn range – also 100% post-consumer recycled, printing in black only. Both papers are supplied by Paperback, who pioneered recycled paper in the UK; they are a workers co-operative, like Calverts, and local. In their own words, “Seed Society is all about making it fun to grow plants into local, fresh, organic and delicious food – even in urban places where we don’t all have gardens or allotments. What’s the point? Secret Seed Society want to revolutionise the way we interact with food. We’re concerned about the food miles, packaging, soil quality, costs, health issues, and lack of community driven by the current food economy. The recession feels like the perfect time to renew this.  ‘No Hens in the Pen’ was launched at the Hay Festival, where the concept went down very well. So here’s to more titles, reprints and lots of healthy, vegetable-munching kids.
http://www.secretseedsociety.com
http://www.paperback.coop
http://www.kept.it
http://www.jeanpwebster.com

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Is Print Dead? No. It just Smells Funny.

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Beatrice Bless from Camberwell School of Art was one of a group of students  who came on a study visit to Calverts two weeks ago with their tutor, Phil Seddon, who is running a module on Typography and Print Production – part of the FdA Design Practice course (in his other life, Phil is a senior designer at Mystery).

Beatrice’s course submission was an industry report entitled ‘Is Print Design Dead?’, for which she interviewed four design and print practitioners, asking them a range of questions around sustainability issues in design and the future of our industry. Notably, she asked Sean Murphy (Value & Service, print and editorial designers) “do you think print design will die?” – to which Sean replied “print will never die. When I was at college, it was always this kind of discussion – whether digital technology will spell the end of print. Now, 15 years later, nothing has changed …” He could also have added that well-designed print can communicate more effectively than other media, because it engages both the intellect and the senses; a printed piece has texture, three dimensions, interactivity and odour as well as colour (which it can reproduce at far higher resolution than electronic media). You may laugh, but our soya- and linseed-oil based Bio inks have a distinct smell (which admittedly fades after a few weeks). We even have a few customers who check the authenticity of our work by sniffing it, before they look at what we’ve actually printed (however, we do have low odour inks, for applications such as food packaging.)

Beatrice selected the papers for her book; the inner pages were printed on Cyclus Offset 115gsm (100% white recycled, uncoated) and the covers, with a set of image cards, on Colourset 270gsm Sand – a tinted board, also 100% post-consumer recycled and uncoated.

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