I Love Printing!

I love imaging technology of all sorts, but I particularly love printing. My passion for printing and print technologies was instilled in me very early by my father who worked as a manager at Europe’s (then) biggest manufacturer of flexible packaging.

Have you ever seen 1-Tonne of chocolate wrappers?

Colodense Ltd – loading cellophane for printing (photo: Mike Hardwell, 2006)

Dad worked for Colodense Ltd, a subsidiary of British Cellophane Limited. The company printed and converted cellophane film to crisp packets, chocolate wrappers and all manner of transparent packaging. It also converted polypropylene films and (my favourite process) made polythene bags which arrived at the factory as little beads of plastic that were blown out of a tanker into a hopper on the roof.

As a child I spent many Saturday mornings sat in Dad’s office. I’d get a plastic cup of something claiming to be cola, and bought KFC for lunch from the newly opened shop on our way to watch Bristol City F.C. in the afternoon. For a nine-year-old, Colodense on a Saturday morning it was a magical place, full of noise and smells and broad Bristolian accents.

But one of my strongest memories was seeing pallets stacked high with rolls of finished packaging, waiting to go off to customers such as Golden Wonder or Cadbury’s. I was always quite good at maths, but I never worked out to my satisfaction how many Cadbury Flakes you could wrap in a pallet load of wrappers. I believe each pallet weighed approx 1000kg, so if you take off (say) 100kg for cores, pallet and shrink-wrap that leaves 900kg of wrapper. If you allowed 2g for each individual wrapper, that would be 450,000 bars of chocolate per pallet of wrapper. Unfortunately, I have no definite information on the true weight of a chocolate wrapper so I may be miles out.

My point is this – without the wrapper, Cadbury just has lots of chocolate that falls apart and ruins your car seats. With a wrapper it becomes the flakiest, tastiest chocolate that tastes like chocolate never tasted before. Packaging is vital to consumer products, and the precisely created and often beautiful images printed on that packaging is what sells the product. Admittedly, Cadbury also got a bit of help from a girl in a gypsy caravan and their clever advertising agency.

Cadbury Flake Gypsy Caravan advert from the mid-80’s

The printing revolution in packaging

More recently I was lucky enough to attend a couple of print exhibitions (FESPA and LabelExpo) while working for Epson. Packaging was a major application for most of the exhibitors, including Epson and its digital label presses. What was clear was the advent of digital technology in printing has opened a whole world of possibilities for packaging designers and brand managers.

Back in the days of my Bristol City season ticket (early 1970’s), the print technology used in packaging was all about speed and volumes. Huge Rotogravure machines, with a carefully aligned station for each colour. These machines themselves must have been a hundred feet long, and then at the end of them were slitters and reeling machines, followed by a separate packing, storage and despatch facility. My weekend visits were actually relatively quiet – most of the time the machines were being cleaned and set-up for next-week’s job – a task that would take all weekend. Basically, to get your beautifully printed chocolate wrappers in 1972 you needed to be able to buy-in to huge production runs. The alternative was probably to sell loose by the pound.

Colodense – Setting-up a laminating machine after a break in the web (photo: Mike Hardwell, 2006)

Today, that has changed. Digital printing means that production runs of 1,000s, 100s or even 10s are practical. In fact, printers can stack-up compatible jobs that use the same substrate and run them one after the other without stopping. Computer control over the printer and the finishing machines mean almost no set-up and maintenance between jobs, and instant turn-round. That enables short production runs with no set-up cost penalty, and that means that packaging can be customised with special offers, or even personalised. We’ve all seen Coca-Cola’s named bottles (printed on Hewlett-Packard kit) for example.

Where’s it all going?

My very own Diet Coke

Digital printing has without doubt changed packaging and through that, branded consumer products. The technology not only impacts on flexible packaging, but also on cardboard and paper packets, and on rigid packaging such as corrugated cardboard board and even glass bottles – both of which can now be printed on directly using digital technologies. I’ve always been a B2B communicator and marketer, but I can see immediately why B2C marketers and brand managers should be getting really excited by these new digital printing technologies.

As the UK and the rest of the western world recovers from the economic problems of the last decade, consumers are once again demanding something different – something they can perceive as of higher value. Digital printing provides a technology that offers endless opportunities to fulfil this demand.

 

Oh my God! They use Exact!

This is not a criticism – this was my reaction the first time I used the dental practice management software at my new practice.

When I trained as a dental nurse I spent 18 months working for a large chain of dental practices, and although I worked at two locations 30 miles or so apart, they used the same software; Carestream CS R4 (known widely as Kodak R4). However, shortly after I qualified I was offered a job nearer to home for a smaller organisation with an excellent reputation for staff development.

“Great,” I thought. “Smaller organisation, bigger practice with wider variety of work. Just what I need to set my career on the right track.”

All seemed good. I liked the building, my new colleagues, journey to work, everything. Until I came to nurse for a new dentist on my own for the first time at the new practice. I think he heard me say; “Oh my God! They use Exact.” During my interviews and induction training I discussed the software installed at my new surgery. However, it hadn’t dawned on me that Software of Excellence Exact does some things differently to R4. In fact, from a nurses perspective, it does a few things very differently.

Practice management software

Dental surgeries these days depend so much on practice management software that it has become totally embedded in everything nurses and dentists do. These amazing software systems manage appointments and workloads, patient records and even the X-Ray imaging equipment we use everyday. So it was a real shock when I realised I was using a system completely new to me that does some very fundamental tasks differently to the system I had ALWAYS previously used.

I somehow survived my first day. I came home after work, cried a bit, then found some online training courses. I got my dentist and practice manager to show me the things I couldn’t understand from the video. Now I’m perfectly happy using Exact and have to say that both systems are great to use – though arguably Exact is easier for dentists and R4 better matches the needs of dental nurses.

The point is…

Today we all rely totally on computers, even in work as complex, skilful and professionalised as dental surgery. The place where that reliance fails is the user interface – where man (or dental nurse) meets machine (especially a RVG 6100 digital radiography system sensor).

Image produced by Carestream Dental RVG 6500 System
RVG Image (source Carestream Dental website)

Carestream R4 and Exact are by far the most common practice management systems in use in UK dentist practices. I hope that I’ve learned how important these systems are to my work. I’d like to think that all designers of practice management software take the time to consider how fundamental dental nurses are to their products – especially ones using their product for the first time.

As a practising dental nurse I focus on the patient’s well being, the clinical environment and assisting my dentists with the procedures they carry out. I need to be able to ‘not think’ about the computer system I use – it has to just work the way I do. Or do I mean that I have to just work the way it does? It’s hard to tell.

It’s all in the name

One day a couple of years ago, I looked up from my desk, glanced at a paper, and discovered that someone had invented 3D-Printing. Except they hadn’t.

Once I worked out what was being described I realised that I wrote about it 20-odd years ago (in a publication called Time Compression Technologies) while working with one of my CAD clients. So long ago that it’s no-longer in the magazine’s online archive.

So what’s the fuss over 3D-Printing all about given that it would appear people were using the technique decades ago? Why do I feel so annoyed by the current fashion to 3D-Print everything, and even more annoyed by the media’s fascination for 3D-Printing?

To my mind, it’s all in the name – and I’m jealous. Jealous that I didn’t think of that name at the time, because I’m sure it would have got masses of publicity for my client and made a personal fortune for me. But I didn’t, and instead focussed my efforts on writing complicated technical descriptions for niche publications read by the handful of engineers and industrial designers who ‘got it’. And because a few more of them eventually got it, we’re here today. Only it’s got a new name and EVERYONE gets it. Or do they?

3D-Printing is (in my opinion) wrongly used by the press more often than it used correctly. What is often meant by 3D-Printing is actually Additive Manufacturing or AM. This refers to manufacturing techniques where components are made by adding material rather than cutting or moulding material.

3D-Models

Dyson DC01 (source : www.dyson.co.uk)

‘Back in the day’, we called it ‘Rapid Prototyping’. 3D CAD products were just becoming mainstream (though they were still hugely expensive) and their ability to create new designs through computer models was opening new doors for engineers and industrial designers. Vehicle manufacturers were using them to create simulations of aerodynamic performance and even crash-testing designs before building a single car. Domestic appliance designers were using 3D CAD to create visually exciting products that also happened to be vastly more efficient. It was all going on.

SLS 63 AMG (C 197) 2009

Around that time, software developers created Computer Aided Manufacturing – the CAM part of CAD/CAM. Linking the two ideas meant that they could create instructions to drive computer controlled tools straight from the CAD model. The design was simply converted into the code needed to guide milling machines, lathes, etc. in order to create the moulds and other tools needed for production.

Rapid Prototyping

In the early 1980s some bright spark realised that they could use a CAD/CAM tool path to guide a laser. The laser could then be used to precisely cut materials, or to cure photo-hardening polymers. This could then be used to create prototype products quickly and much more cheaply than first creating the production tooling. Users (increasingly ‘consumers’) could react to the design before it was committed to manufacturing. The rapid prototype was born.

At the time this technology was still expensive. As well as the complex software and powerful workstations needed, you needed complex devices to manage unpleasant chemicals, and you needed skilled model-makers to assemble the parts and create a realistic finish. But it was still better than pulling a few out of a warehouse only to find the public prefers a different colour and wants it longer.

3D-Printing – so what is all the fuss about?

The buzz-phrase is ‘democratisation of technology’. Basically, as the idea has become more mainstream, people have found new ways of doing cheaper, better and simpler.

While writing about Rapid Prototyping in the late nineties, a parallel technology was also developing – Inkjet printing. This was originally designed for 2-D printing on paper and similar substrates. Combining this technology with materials that could be deposited to create a 3-D object has given rise to a whole group of relatively cheap ‘deposition’ devices for 3D-Printing and AM.

So let’s look as a few 3D-Printing technologies

Stereolithography

A prototype air vent made using stereolithography (source: www.wb-3d.com)

The Granddad of 3-D printing. Developed in the early 1980’s, lasers are used to create layer-upon-layer of the model from photo-hardened polymer resin. The laser shines on the surfaces and the printed item is lowered into the bath of polymer layer-by-layer as it cures. This technique was one of the first used by industrial designers to create ‘rapid prototypes’ of products (such as mobile ‘phones) for consumer testing.

Stereolithography – how it works (source: www.i.materialise.com)

The development of stereolithography led to the creation of the STL file format, widely used by multiple 3D-Printing technologies. It can create accurate models, but is a complex and expensive technique, and strength depends on the material used.

Metal sintering

This is really an AM technique uses a computer controlled laser to melt metal powder to form a design. It is also sometimes used with plastics. Early techhniques had names such as selective laser sintering, direct metal laser sintering, and selective laser melting, but they all work in much the same way.

Sintering (source: www.plunkettassociates.co.uk)
Direct Metal Laser Sintering (source: www.plunkettassociates.co.uk)

Items made like this can be used in production or for prototyping, but like all 3D-Printing techniques, design and the material used have a big influence on strength and accuracy, and it is therefore not always a suitable technique for all production components. Additional design work and modified tool paths might also be required to achieve desired results.

For long production runs, other techniques might be quicker or cheaper, but metal sintering opens new opportunities for customised and short run components.

Fused deposition modelling

Fortus 400mc – professional FDM system – priced around $185,000

Fused deposition modelling (FDM) is the technique that most people think of when they use the phrase 3D-Prnting.

FDM most frequently refers to models made of small beads of thermoplastic resin that is deposited hot and sticks to previous layers as it cools. This is a highly scalable technique that can be used for everything from hobbyist and model making uses, to creating complex industrial components for test rigs or specialist equipment.

Fortus 400mc – professional FDM system – priced around $185,000

Again, strength depends of design and material. It often has a ‘grained’ strength like wood, which exhibits great tensile or compressive strength in one direction but might be weak in torsion, or deformable in another direction.

Finish

The resolution of the finished item depends on many factors, and use of 3D-Printing and AM techniques should always take this into account when considering any application. But let’s face it – this group of technologies are here to stay.

Industrial 3D-Printers costing six-figure sums are in common use, and hobbyist machines costing just a few hundred pounds are mainstream. There are other technologie0s, and all are becoming more refined and everyday.

I’m proud to have done my bit for stereo lithography, rapid prototyping and 3D-Printing. I just wish I’d thought of the name.

Industria Grafica quotes Brian Minards on design

Brian Minards

Industria Grafica has quoted Brian Minards, Precision PR’s branding and graphic design associate. Brian discusses the part that graphic design will play at this year’s IPEX 2017 exhibition.

Informa, organisers of IPEX, are keen to show how technologies are making print more relevant. Digital printing is making true personalisation a reality, and providing useful data for on-pack proof-of-purchase promotions. These same technologies mean that designers and printers must work more collaboratively to exploit their capabilities.

What role do you think that design plays in today’s mixed-up-media world, and particularly in your business?