Celebrating Young Lions

The Client Cannes Young Lions Exhibition, BBDO ad agency
The Player: Anro Print and Digital Solutions (www.anro.com)
Tools & Supplies: HP Scitex FB6100 UV Printer, Caldera GrandRIP+, HP FB200 UV inks, various media
The Job: Atlanta-based design agency BBDO along with HP commissioned Anro in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to produce wide-format graphics for the Cannes Young Lions Team USA kickoff party and special exhibition held in New York this past May.

The event, which honored four teams of young creatives selected to represent the US in the 2010 Cannes International Advertising Festival Young Lions Competition held this summer in France, featured large, freestanding decorative panels designed to show off each team’s creative work.

The panels—some printed two-sided—would feature graphic samples of the competitors’ work and accompanying, descriptive verbiage. Early on, it was decided that the panels would be composed of a variety of different rigid materials: from 3mm white and frosted acrylic and 3mm Sintra Black to 3mm brushed/stainless DiBond and even ¼-inch Zebrawood veneer.

Production: The variety of substrates also opened up the use of white ink, which Anro has resident on its HP Scitex FB6100 UV printer.

In fact, among the biggest challenges of the job, says Todd Knipe, Anro’s IT project manager, was determining how the images would appear on the variety of substrates—and, in particular, how the white ink would act as a base layer to the 6-color (CMYKcm) overprint. “We would print a test on a sample substrate and then make any adjustments necessary,” he says. “Sometimes we would need to knock our specific areas of the artwork in order to get the opacity and quality we were looking for.”

With artwork supplied by BBDO, Anro made adjustments to optimize the use of white ink, then using its Caldera GrandRIP+, prepared the files for output to the Scitex FB6100.

“The white ink and the FB6100 allowed us to lay down two or more passes of white ink to cover the substrate in areas where the designers did not want the surface visible,” says Knipe. “We essentially created an opaque white smooth surface to then go back and print 6-color on top of that. This created a unique design effect.”

And, he says, because the project managers as well as BBDO designers were onsite during output, “Our proofing requirements were actually press checks. We would test on a sample piece of material, make any adjustments that were necessary, and then went [right] into production.” Adjustments were also made during the print run if necessary. Final output was with HP FB200 UV inks at a resolution of 432 x 400 dpi, and a speed of about 118 square feet/hour.

In the end, says Knipe, “Everything looked great. The options of printable substrates are almost endless and it was exiting to see this project bring that to a reality.”