Digital print

Beautiful ground-level Britomart artwork printed by Soar

If you’re strolling around Auckland’s CBD this January, direct your feet to the Britomart precinct to see the artwork of Charlotte Graham. Installed on the ground, it was printed by Soar.

The artwork, known as Te Waiora, consists of 24 hand-painted water droplets, many of them inscribed with Maori motifs. The droplets have been materialised as 1200 self-adhesive decals, which you can see applied to walkways throughout Britomart. Te Waiora will remain in place until the end of January 2019.

Charlotte created the artwork to emphasise Christmas as a time of connectedness between whanau and friends; people and the land; past, the present and future. She chose water as a motif because of the way it refers to the maritime histories of Maori, Pakeha and Pacific peoples, as well as Aotearoa’s more recent immigrants. In the Maori language, wai means ‘water’ and ora means ‘life’.

The droplets were printed with UV-resistant latex inks on two specialist anti-slip self-adhesive products, to allow for different surfaces, using our new HP Latex R2000 digital press. This same press is often used to print vinyl car wraps, bespoke adhesive wall murals, point of sale materials and signage. It can print both on roll and rigid substrates up to 50mm thick and boasts the smoothest white ink laydown available in New Zealand today.

To find out more about reproducing artwork onto self-adhesive or other materials, email Brian Landry at brianl@soarprint.co.nz

Three containers, eight engineers, one almighty printer!

Things have been fizzing at Fusion Print, Soar’s sister company in Hamilton. Earlier this year, Fusion took delivery of three containers full of state-of-the-art digital print technology – the Océ VarioPrint i300…unassembled. Then it was simply a matter of putting it together.

Shortly after the containers arrived, eight engineers from Holland, Australia and New Zealand arrived at Fusion to begin the assembly and deployment process. The crates had to be carefully unpacked and every component checked before installation could begin. From end-to-end, the process took five weeks. Graeme Foote, general manager at Fusion, says it was fascinating to watch.

“We created a time-lapse video of the install and it’s compulsive viewing. Watching this monster digital press come to life was extraordinary over five weeks, but it’s even more amazing when you watch the whole process in four minutes!”

The end result is a printer that’s 16 metres long and 2.6 metres tall – longer than the average city bus and nearly as high. Already it’s pulling its weight at Fusion. The press was available for duty from March 22^nd and has completed several multi-page print jobs.

“Fred Soar and I first saw the i300 on a business trip to Holland last year. We were impressed by its ability to produce exceptionally high-quality digital print outputs – sheets go in one end, and a fully-finished brochure or book pops out the other end.

“At the time we agreed that if Océ could ensure our machine would produce that quality, we’d be happy. As it turns out, the quality we’re getting is even better than what we saw in Holland – our i300 is over-delivering!”

So what’s so special about this multi-million-dollar machine? Quite a lot! The Océ VarioPrint i300 is a next-generation sheet-fed digital press that revolutionises the printing of multi-page outputs.

You can literally press one button and have a fully-formed book come out the other end of the press.
Every output can be different, because the press accepts variable data. For example, you can print a personalised brochure or catalogue for a high-value customer, changing out text and images wherever you like.
For small runs (1 to 2000) it’s a cost-effective way to get a high quality result.
The i300 can fold and stitch (staple) a book in a way that creates a square spine up to 10mm wide – up to 180 pages plus a cover. Your get a perfect bound book, but without the high price that usually comes with perfect binding.

Talk to Graeme Foote about printing with the Océ VarioPrint i300 – call 027 2959224 or email graeme@fusionprint.co.nz

Watch the time lapse video of installation.

Free Techweek workshop about turning print into web apps

We’re running a Techweek workshop to show you how Realview's Partica seamlessly turns print PDFs into web content. You’ll also find out about the new syndication marketplace it makes possible.

The workshop will be introduced and moderated by Russell Brown, esteemed digital journalism innovator and founding board member of the Digital Media Trust. He’ll be supported by Realview CEO Richard Lindley and Soar’s own print-to-digital specialist, Stuart Shepherd. There are only 60 places available, so be quick!

Workshop: Partica: seamless print-to-web publishing and syndication

Where: The GridAKL, 12 Madden Street

When: Wednesday 23 May

Time: 2pm to 3pm

Register online now

More about Techweek

Introduction to the Partica workshop

Publishers are sitting on huge quantities of evergreen content – locked up in PDFs that have never been seen online. What if there was a simple, cost-effective way to find, extract, organise and monetise that content? There is. Welcome to Partica by Realview Technologies.

Partica's direct-to-mobile digital publishing platform instantly closes the gap between print and digital, transforming your PDFs into articles and delivering them to mobile, tablet, and desktop. Its unique AI-driven search and discovery engine finds, sorts and reports existing digital content from PDFs (or from a website, CMS or RSS feed).

Those capabilities underpin a new business platform: Partica Content Marketplace. Think of it as like a stock image library, only for articles. Partica Content Marketplace is a working syndication platform that brings together publishers, writers and customers in a world that's crying out for content.

TARGET AUDIENCE

People and businesses with new and legacy content to sell, plus businesses that need easy, effective and transparent access to high-quality content for digital publication.