Printing Firework!

To celebrate Wallpaper’s 20-year anniversary, the magazine teamed up with HP for a ground-breaking campaign that reinvents digital poster production. The project used HP Indigo’s award-winning "HP Mosaic" technology to create 220,000 unique commemorative posters, two of which will be distributed with each issue of the publication.

Based on brand new designs from esteemed studio Spin, the customized posters are set to reach 93 countries worldwide. The designs have been produced in collaboration with print and communication specialist, F.E. Burman, at the company’s state-of-the-art production facility in London on an HP Indigo 10000 Digital Press.

To make this even prettier, the F.E. Burman's creative team created a dust-jacket for the magazine which is personalized and is sent to various people in the industry. Each personalized cover is folded to show a unique firework. Once opened, the cover turns into a B2 poster of a massive firework party!

They used HP SmartStream Designer to create the design templates and they are encouraging other designers to begin enjoying the power of variable data rationalization for their campaigns. HP SmartStream Designer lets you create sophisticated, custom jobs through a simple, affordable variable data tool optimized for HP Indigo presses. Based on industry-standard tools, HP SmartStream Designer includes a design software plug-in that you can use to conveniently personalize any print job’s images, text, and colors—creating virtually unlimited variations of the design—to maximize impact.

To create the fireworks, they have used the HP Mosaic feature in a very unique way. They created 3 channels (a channel is a graphic frame that hold variable data) and placed them one on top of the other to accompany the personalized names. Each HP Mosaic channel used different graphics yet the graphics were not given any of the HP Mosaic parameters such as Transposition, Zoom or Rotation. Using HP Mosaic in that manner will cause the software to select one of the graphics randomly and to bring them in their 100% size to a fixed position.

Set A - Bottom Layer:

Set B - Middle Layer:

Set C - Top Layer:

After having all of these elements lined up, the designer can enable HP Mosaic's "Shuffle Colors" feature and assign a set of colors to be picked randomly. Each of these seed files is made with a "Black" Spot Color and the designer can define to replace this spot with a set of colors - so the output will be a random shape with a random color.

The beautiful magic is created afterwards in the printing process... Imagine having 3 channels one on top of the other, each of them get a random shape and each shape has a random color but... all the colors are marked as "overprint" which means that the interaction between the selected colors is causing new colors to appear and to create a visual fiesta!

But that is not all! Using the "HP Spine" feature in HP SmartStream Designer, The F.E Burman creative team also created a unique spine for each of the cover. The spines for each multiple order, placed together, create one beautiful image of Fireworks, a concept created by SPIN Studio, using HP's variable data Digital Print techniques and HP’s unique Spine Printing capabilities.

To use this feature you need simply create an image and define a channel in the design template and to decide how many spines should be created. The software will then create the correct slice to fit in each of the books.

“We’re pleased to have been able to share the capabilities of HP Indigo technology, and to have enabled so many people to own their own exclusive, personalized Tony Brook print. The entire project with Wallpaper epitomizes how print can be continually reinvented to be ever more relevant and exciting, and to create entirely new, unprecedented possibilities.” - Francois Martin, Global Head of Marketing, Graphics Solutions Business, HP Inc.

"I think the end result is outstanding. The intensity of the colors is so much more than I thought capable from digital printing. ... It's been an incredibly exciting project working with HP Indigo and has reinvented the way we think about print. In terms of creating unique content, this is only the start. I think there's more we do in the future." - Sarah Douglas, Creative Director, Wallpaper