Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and I’m here with Kyle Kolbe, who is Senior Manager of Corporate Graphics – Corporate and Graphics Technology at Playboy Enterprises. 

Kyle Kolbe:  Yes. 

Cary Sherburne:  Must be a fun place to work. 

Kyle Kolbe:  Yeah, it is pretty fun.  It’s always changing and so we always have to look at new ways that we can help support the businesses and how they’re – the different vertical businesses and how they’re changing. 

Cary Sherburne:  So maybe you could talk a little bit about what your role is in the company, what your group does for the company. 

Kyle Kolbe:  My group, I’m in IT, and we’ve always been a very service oriented IT that’s always been involved with the different creative groups and sometimes playing a creative services role for them and always looking at their processes and how they can be improved.  I have always been involved – I’ve been there for 12 years and have always been involved with the prepress operation and all of the graphics.  I really started out as just a help desk tech that specialized in the Adobe Suite of Software and then any kind of PDF and PDF pre-flighting. 

Cary Sherburne:  So within the company you actually, you guys actually do all of the layout and get the magazine ready for production and then you ship it off to a printer, is that how it works?

Kyle Kolbe:  Yes.  Yeah, we actually use a publishing system, the K-4 Publishing System and so we have editorial articles coming in either remotely or from editors that are in-house.  We have layout artists that are putting their layouts and then those get married together and then they go to our Prepress Department where they do the final color changes and you know, ink separations for all the prepress work, and then that is – then we make contract proofs and make our final PDFs and then off to our printer. 

Cary Sherburne:  And then are you also dealing with electronic, you know, some of the web stuff and do you – I mean, you must use some of the same content on the web. 

Kyle Kolbe:  Yeah, so you know, we source – these days you know just to gain the most our of out content, pretty much any  new photography project that goes through needs to feed multiple businesses.  So you know, it needs to have content that can be used in our magazines – in the main magazine, Playboy Magazine, and then also our special edition magazines.  These are like the lingerie specials and things.  And then into our mobile group, which needs to be more PG content, so not have any nudity so it can be internationally be shown, or you know, sold to mobile phones.  And also our online group, which has a, you know, various adult levels to it. 

And so we will take those in and then they need to go into our digital asset management system, be photo edited in a different system and then those pictures are then separated into those groups and redistributed. 

Cary Sherburne:  Thank you very much for sharing with us.  It was great to have you Kyle. 

Kyle Kolbe:  All right, no problem.  Great. 

Cary Sherburne: Thanks.