An Invitation To Quality

After initially turning down the job, Hitachi Data Systems' in-plant ended up producing an intricate invitation worthy of being named Best of Show.

Sometimes the best work is masked by its apparent simplicity. That's the case with the 1998 In-Print Best of Show winner.

To look at the winning piece, a holiday party invitation printed by Hitachi Data Systems, the untrained eye might notice only the lack of colorful artwork and grandiose design.

But the trained eyes of our five judges took in all the detail: the intricate spot varnishing, the near-perfect stitching, the sharp registration, the accurate crossovers.

And though the judges spent a long time comparing the merits of this piece with those of the eventual runner up, in the end the sheer printing craftsmanship that went into this invitation won them over. The printer, they determined, had obviously spent a lot of time making sure that every detail in this piece was as perfect as possible.

And to think, the job almost got sent to a commercial printer.

"Originally, I turned the job down because of the intricacy of it and the time factor involved," recalls Mike Stasko, publications manager. "I rarely turn work down, but we were really busy at the time. They came back and practically begged us to do it because it was a little less expensive to do it internally."

Multi-part Project

The invitation was designed by Kim Haley in Hitachi's marketing group, with Celia Forrest coordinating the entire project. It consists of an eight-page saddle-stitched 61⁄4x61⁄4˝ booklet printed with gold, red and black ink. A diamond-shaped spot varnish pattern covers each page. The invitation includes a response card and preaddressed response envelope. It all fits into a white envelope with Hitachi's return address in the upper left corner.

The job of printing the piece fell on the shoulders of Chris Miller, supervisor of the San Diego-based in-plant. It required a number of passes on the two-color, 14x20˝ Ryobi 522 press. He first printed the gold and red on the front. On the second pass he added the black and the dull varnish. A third pass printed the red and the varnish on the inside cover.

Attention To Detail

"It's just tight registration work," remarks Miller, who says he had to make a lot of plate adjustments to get everything to fit.

The original file containing the job was sent to the in-plant electronically from Hitachi's Santa Clara headquarters, near San Francisco. From that point Louise Rendich handled all prepress production, including color separations, trapping, printer spreads and film output. Miller produced a Matchprint proof for the customer, and once it was approved, printing began.

But not on printing quality alone was this job judged. Its stitches were dead on—straight with their ends nearly touching. The job was stitched on the in-plant's 12-year-old Rosback stitcher after being folded on a Baum folder.

From there, the invitations—980 in all—were assembled by hand, with workers wearing gloves so the oil on their hands wouldn't mar the varnish.

"I felt like it would be a good, challenging project for us," Stasko says. "After seeing the results, we were really pleased with the overall quality of it. That's a real tribute to both Louise and Chris because I know they put a lot of effort into making sure everything worked and fit right, and getting the kind of quality we expect out of the pieces we do out of our shop."

Bob Neubauer can be reached at:

bneubauer@napco.com