Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  I want to talk to you today about quality.  I want to talk to you about print quality.  I got an issue of a new magazine that just started called, Vintage Magazine, Premiere Issue.  Beautifully done; the cover has a slight emboss on it.  It’s interesting, the binding, of course, shows the non-cover approach.  Every page is an adventure.  You are seeing inserts, you are seeing coated paper, there is uncoated paper.  There are various levels of printing. 

For instance, there’s a section in here, I’m gonna find it, where you have all these different units that open up; some are di-cut, some are not.  You have photography – the most beautiful photography.  You have heavy stock, you have light stock, you have glossy stock, you have dull stock.  You have unbelievable typography.  Virtually every page is different in some way, shape or form. 

This is a phenomenal first issue for any organization and has to rank up there with one of the great collectables in the printing industry.  Published by a company in New York City; their website, by the way, is VintageZine.com, where they have PDFs and other images from the printed magazine itself.  It says it was printed by a company called Capital Offset in Concord, New Hampshire.  Not a company I know, but when I went to their website, it says that they specialize in museum printing.  And this would rank up there as a museum quality content and format and presentation. 

So, Vintagezine.com, subscribe.  We need to keep this kind of thing going to show that print can really do a phenomenal job.

And to emphasize that, I present to you a student project.  This is the Taga Project.  Taga, T-A-G-A, Technical Association of the Graphic Arts Administered through PIA in Pennsylvania, student chapters throughout the United States, and I think internationally, produce a project every year and they enter it into a competition.  This is the one from RIT for this year.  By the way, all done by students, printed on the Next Press Digital Printer that we have here at RIT using their dimensional clear.  That material is a coating that gives you a dimensionality to it, so it’s almost three-dimensional.  You can actually feel it. 

Now, the students did some really interesting things here.  First of all if you fan the cover out, notice that it looks then, it looks like the cover.  And in fact, it says RIT TAGA on it.  If you do it the other way, it does not say RIT TAGA on it, but looks very much like the cover. 

The other thing the students did was they learned about – by the way, this was some other areas where they used dimensional clear as well, but there are some other things they’ve done that are even more interesting.  They used these new QR codes.  And if you’ve downloaded the software to your cell phone and photographed that, it will take you to a website.  So, there for every article, because TAGA materials by students consist of the format, but hen individual technical articles that are in the publication.

The other thing about this that made me very proud, and by the way, all the students are listed, their photographs, a little – some information about each one.  Just to give you an idea.  But this was a collaborative effort by students of the School Of Printing, School Of Graphic Design, and the Bio-Med and Visual Graphics part of the Photography School at RIT.  Now, that is fantastic that students from different disciplines have come together to create this unbelievable publication.  So the technical articles are phenomenal, the typography is beautiful.  The printing of it, the bindery of it, I mean, this is a very special kind of product. 

So, these kinds of things are the things that really make print stand out.  Although you can put the content on a website, you can’t put the tactile feel of it, you cannot put the look of it, you cannot put the fact that you are going to save this for a long period of time, perhaps go back and look at it again.  Perhaps this is another thing you’ll save and go back and look at again.  Will you do that to a website?  Will you have that same feeling for a website?  Will the iPad really emulate this?  I mean, you can see a book and you can turn the pages of a book, but it’s not the same thing as having the physical book there. 

Well, you see where I stand on all of this.  In any case, phenomenal work and I think everybody should be applauded for what they did. 

And that’s my opinion.  Take care. 

Next Time…

Well, now I want you to take a number of your photographs.  Ah, it eve plays music by the way, when you go to it.  Turn that off…