Special Report: The Three Ps - Five Production Professionals Share Their Views of Today’s and Tomorrow Best Technologies

If you want to put your finger on the pulse of the technologies that are driving the catalog industry, it’s best to go directly to the source.

Catalog Success asked five catalog production professionals to share their thoughts on some of the latest and greatest tools that have transformed the way catalogs are created, produced and printed. In addition, we asked for their predictions on what will be the hottest tools of tomorrow.

Catalog Success: What has been the most interesting or provocative technology embraced by the catalog industry in the past few years?

Francis J. Crowley, executive vice president, Spencer Press, a catalog printer: When there was first talk about digital workflow and computer-to-plate [CTP], we listened to our customers who told us they were interested in digital workflow. And when the customer is the stimulus to change, you move to adopt the technologies a lot faster. Today, 90 percent of our customers’ print jobs are produced digitally.

If I had to choose one technology that has improved our efficiency and service, that would be large-format platesetters that we use to run plates for our Heidelberg M-3000 presses.

Scott Borhauer, central imaging manager, Brown Printing: The most provocative technology in the past couple of years has been the transformation from film to CTP. Both printer and cataloger receive multiple benefits from an all-digital workflow. Printers have reaped several rewards in this transformation, including better registration and faster makereadies.

Linda Manes Goodwin, executive director, Manes Goodwin Associates, print production consultant: Content management! Catalogers need to think about prepurposing content, rather than repurposing it. We should be managing and manipulating it in a way that enables variable-data [printing] and giving customers exactly what they want—in the medium they want, whether that’s online, in the form of an e-mail or something that’s printed. That’s the dreamy way to think about digital asset management.

Perhaps the reason asset management hasn’t been more widely adopted to this point is that it often requires a very large investment on the part of the publisher, and you’ve got to be able to justify a return on the investment.

Implementation also can be wrenching to an organization if it’s not magnificently planned. But with the Internet and other media becoming more of a factor in the way catalogers service their customers, it makes sense that catalogs are now seeing the need to better manage their workflow and their content.

Jim Treis, executive vice president, sales and marketing, Arandell Corp., a printer: Digital photography. We’re working with customers who are achieving beautiful results from a quality standpoint, but from a business perspective, they’re also benefiting from lower costs and time savings. There’s also the ability to archive digital images and be able to use them cross-platform. I’d estimate that about 80 percent of our clients are using digital photography to some extent.

Catalog Success: Why haven’t digital content management solutions been more widely embraced by the catalog industry?

Treis: Asset management is becoming increasingly important. Right now, we’re handling asset management for about 40 percent of our customer base. … It really depends on what the product is.

For example, are they turning over the book new every time? How much of the content is picked up from catalog to catalog? Some of our clients have [satellite] offices or other divisions that need access to images or product information, and that’s when asset management then comes into play—allowing 24/7 permission to go out and grab the content to which they’re entitled to access.

But why don’t more catalogers use these solutions? Frankly, most people don’t have the time, budget, patience or a robust IT department that can maintain and monitor a content management system themselves.

Catalog Success: What’s going to be the hottest catalog manufacturing technology in the near future?

Borhauer: XML. More specifically, JDF [Job Definition Format], which is a comprehensive XML-based file format [and] proposed industry standard for end-to-end job ticket specifications, combined with a message description standard and message interchange protocol.

JDF is designed to streamline information exchange between different applications and systems. … It provides not only a solution, but a flexible and comprehensive one. It’s capable of creating a bridge between each separate island in the printing stream, from the moment a customer places an order to the moment the finished product is placed in the customer’s hands—regardless of how many manufacturers contributed machinery … or how complex the task.

Patty Leonardt, marketing director, Eye 4 Media: I recently had a client who was having difficulty getting its covers approved on a tight deadline. There were several people who had to sign off on layout and photography before finalizing the files.

We sent the client [soft proof] PDF files via e-mail for approval. They were viewed by staffers who made minor adjustments. When the corrections were completed, the client approved the soft proof, and we created the final hard-copy proofs—all in a single day.

Treis: The hot topic is Internet proofing. In the next five years, the technology to proof on a monitor will have evolved, [so] that we actually can have serious discussions about previewing and approving preliminary page proofs.

But Internet proofing will be a good solution if pleasing color is all you expect. If you’re in the high-end color-critical demographic, you’ll still need to rely on a hard-copy, dot-based, contract proofs.

Gretchen Kirby Peck is the president and chief creative officer for P.A.G.E.s, an editorial consultancy and freelance writing firm specializing in the graphic arts.