Pureprint spruces up Eye mag with unique covers

Pureprint has completed a job using HP’s Mosaic personalisation software for 8,000 magazines with unique covers for Eye magazine.

The job was completed two weeks ago after an extensive design period during which 10 base artwork designs were created and processed with 800 variations, leading to what Pureprint director Richard Owers described as the first magazine to use the Mosaic software for each individual cover.

“You can tell its target audience is graphic designers around the world and it is distributed all over to that image-conscious audience and so the magazine generally is produced with a number of papers, print finishes and gloss and matt sections,” said Owers.

“The finished article was great and it’s certainly the first time we’ve done something like this.” 

The magazines were printed two-up during a week-long period at Pureprint’s Uckfield, West Sussex site, using a B2 HP Indigo 10000 for the printing and a Muller Martini PUR binder for binding. A variety of different papers were used, including 250gsm Arcoprint for the cover, 135gsm Condat matt for the inner pages and Condat gloss plus Munken Pure Rough for two inner sections.

Utilising the same typeface and subject matter for each base cover, all the covers were numbered, and Eye’s designers chose to use Mosaic’s enlargement factor heavily for effect, declining to use its rotation feature.

Owers added that it was important to work together with designers prior to printing to keep the process smooth.   

“Because of the amount of versioning you can achieve throughout Mosaic, the key thing is working with designers to try and proof different versions and doing all the parameters, then getting to creative approval and going from there,” he added.

“In the world of personalised print and variable content print it fits into that pretty well.”

Edited by John L Walters, Eye magazine is an international quarterly review of graphic design work.