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Last month, this column looked at the adjustments designers have to make to begin designing labels and packaging for output on digital presses, especially if they have been designing for flexo. The column looked at some of the challenges associated with the transition, and now it will look at the benefits and creative freedoms.
The fact is, for every potential challenge or limitation designers face when switching from designing for flexo to designing for digital, there are a multitude of advantages. These characteristics can be particularly beneficial when jobs are designed from scratch and do not have to match existing creative.
Making Smooth Transitions
The first benefit is expanded creative freedom because of the WYSWYG nature of digital files. Flexo plates go through a scrubbing process as the plate is being prepared. As a result, colors screened to lower than 2 percent will often disappear. This affects things like glows, gradients, drop shadows, screened four-color process images, and soft color transitions. Especially when combined with dot gain, this drop out can result in harsh transitions. With digital, however, no such drop-off exists, giving designers a wider gray scale range, and smoother gradients. High-end flexo operations can get this drop out down to about 1 percent, but in day-to-day application, notes Elisha Tropper, former owner of Prestige Label and now founder of T3 Associates, Harrison, N.Y., even at 1 percent, that variation can still be very visible.
Packing a Tiny Punch
Because of the consequences of plate scrubbing, it is also difficult for the flexo process to reproduce small knockouts of type, especially when printing in four-color. According to Mr. Tropper, this often occurs under six points, but even for good printers, it becomes difficult once you drop under four points. This problem disappears with digital.
Another benefit of digital is that it offers a higher level of control with significantly less variability than flexography. This means you do not have to build in the same margin of error, such as trapping or dot gain.
"If you are using any kind of photographic image, the image can vary from process to process, but printing digitally, the reproduction will be identical," says Mr. Tropper. "This enables you to print across multiple substrates and still maintain a very close—if not exact—representation of that image. Or if you change the details of the label often, but keep the basic look the same, or if you have a wide product line, using the same basic design across all products, you maintain [a higher level of] consistency across that product line."
This can be an advantage when designing various sized packages within the same line that may sit side by side on the shelf. "With flexo, you'll make three different sets of plates, potentially all run on different presses, and there will be differences between them," says Mr. Tropper. "With digital, you'll get the same exact image across all sizes."
Variable Imaging
From barcodes to truly personalized packaging for individual consumers, digital is the only technology that can make variable imaging happen. Currently, variable imaging is seen largely in the promotional arena, although there has been some experimentation with one-off, personalized packaging. However, in terms of widespread adoption, designers and marketers have yet to explore what this technology can do.
As designers and their clients become more comfortable with digital output, and as designers explore the creative freedoms available with digital, it becomes increasingly important to establish up front the growth path for the labels or packages for which the designs are created. Most digitally printed packages are for niche products or SKUs that are unlikely to outgrow digital's optimum run length range, but this is not always the case. What happens if a product takes off unexpectedly?
If volumes increase in the future, will production be switched to flexo? If so, once you have designed a job for digital, it is difficult—if not impossible—to reproduce the same thing on a flexo press. If a job has the potential to migrate to flexo, you may want to design it as if it is going to be printed flexo from the start. Alternatively, you may want to design for digital, but limit gradients and knockouts that might be a problem if the process changes. This decision needs to be made on a client-by-client and project-by-project basis.
The differences between the two processes can be noticeable enough that some customers choose to stay digital, even at higher volumes. Mr. Tropper recalls a client that started out small, then even after the product took off, decided to pay the premium and stick with the digital label.
"At certain volumes, costs drop slightly for digital, although not nearly as substantially as for other processes," notes Mr. Tropper. "But more importantly, at higher volumes, printers are [often] willing to drop their margins. Sometimes it's worth it if the design is integral to the marketing of the product."
This situation, however, is rare. Barring comps, sales samples, and product launches, many digital jobs are by nature short-run. "In the wine industry, for example, there is a movement toward the reproduction of artwork on the label," says Mr. Tropper. "Many of the vintners are using art reproductions, so if they are labeling a high-end Bordeaux, each version might feature another artist. People look at these wines as being collectibles. We are also seeing this in the candle and other home decorative products markets, which are also designing elaborate labels. In addition, label purchasers don't want a lot of Halloween inventory sitting around when they are going to be doing Thanksgiving to Christmas inventory."
Even if you are not planning to take your labels or packaging to flexo or other process, marketers may need to match colors across processes. This is also important to know up front so the appropriate combination of colors and print processes can be chosen.
Wacky World of Digital
The world of digital output presents both tremendous challenges and tremendous opportunities for designers and customers. While digital production has become mainstream in commercial print, its uses are still being explored in packaging. Marketers on the packaging side have yet to fully explore how it can drive their marketing in a powerful way.
Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry writer, an analyst specializing in digital workflow and technologies. Her e-mail address is htollvr@aol.com.
author: By Heidi Tolliver Nigro