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If you're doing a wow piece for HP, you’ve got to really showcase every possible feature
that's out there for the Indigo. It’s a fun challenge though, so with this piece,
I decided to incorporate everything I possibly could in one piece. So, I incorporated variable
data printing, meaning that it was personalized with the person's name; the fact that Indigo
can print onto black paper with white ink; that it can print on metallic and we can mask
it out with white ink and sort of colors; that you can do die cutting and then have
that folded into an envelope; that you can have die cutting and have that spot mounted
on to something so that you can have dimensionality within the piece. It was every feature that
you sort of want in one showcase piece. And there is dimensionality and it’s something
that as someone was taking it and opening it up, there’s another part to it, there’s
another part to it, so you got to have that sort of “wow” function, from a standpoint
of designing it where people are opening it, and then from a materials standpoint, too.
Because we are using metallic on the outside, I was able to find a pearlized paper, and
this paper actually has a mica surface into it that makes it really look metallic, when
you see the light sort of flash onto it. That was printed, it was die cut out and spot mounted
on top of this piece. And then I wanted to kind of have something that wasn’t metallic,
it wasn’t shiny, so I printed on this really matte black paper. If you get something in
the mail, it’s personalized, it has your name on it, you’re much more apt to sort
of take it and open it up because it like says “John” or “Sue” or “Richard.”
What’s sort of fantastic about the Indigo variable data printing is you can do letters
or you can do objects or images. There’s all sorts of ways you can personalize it.
You open it up… the front of this, it’s personalized again. It’s personalized again
here, and then the whole piece sort of opens up and we have this sort of design. There
were four variations of the interiors that happened, so depending on if you were a customer
or a prospect, or if you had registered or not registered for this other event, the entire
inside would sort of change out on the piece. Even with all that customization that happening
within the piece, because I’m printing it digital, short run, I was still able to stay
within budget for this entire piece. And also, I was able to experiment where we were able
to do a couple prototypes, weigh the prototypes, figure out what the shipping costs would be,
reduce the size ever so slightly so we could keep the shipping costs within budget too.
These are the kind of projects I love as a designer because HP came to me and said, “Hey,
we want something, we want it to be ‘wow,’ we want it to showcase a lot of great features
with Indigo.” So it’s one of those wonderful, playful pieces as a designer where it’s
just like I have a playground of things I have to choose from.