Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Well, I save everything.  People send me stuff and I save it, for whatever reason.  

This is from a company that does labels. And as I went through it, I realized how much the label market has changed.  Back in the 1970’s, I was hired as a consultant by many of the companies in the United States that does labels.  They printed them with flexography with rubber plates.  And then DuPont came out with Cyrel, which allowed you to use a plastic plate and you needed film in order to do it, which allowed many of the label companies to switch over to photographic typesetting.  And that’s where I made my mark was helping companies get into photographic typesetting.  And as we converted over, they were able to introduce more graphics into their label.  And now, as I got through this catalog of labels, one of the things I notice is how much color is now available in labels.  Before this, they were pretty much monochrome… and then the world changed.  So, that was done by both offset lithography, flexography, and also digital printing, which had a lot to say about what has happened in the label market.  

People send me stuff.  I have a friend in Egypt who sends me a calendar every year.  This one was printed on, I think, fake parchment, I’m not sure if that’s real parchment, but it could be.  In any case, I just like the images in it, so I don’t want to throw it out.  And so I’ve got a whole batch of them from various years.  So if anybody wants my Egyptian calendars, you can have them.  

Advertising  Age did an issue on signage.  They called it the Art of the Outdoor.  And, again, as I went through here, I realized another thing that had changed about signage.  It’s much more colorful.  And I saw it as I went around the world in 2008, and which I’m going to do in 2012 as well, is that with large format inkjet, wide format inkjet, we have now changed the entire paradigm in the sign industry.  There’s much more imagery, there’s much more color than there ever was in the past.  In fact, in Los Angeles, there’s a big war going on for what they call the super graphics because there was signage that’s so big that people on the highways are being distracted and causing accidents of various kinds.  But this document that some of the award winners in the category of Outdoor Signage, and again, you can put this signage on about anything nowadays.  You don’t have to paint it on there, you just print is on some material and then affix it to whatever it is.  You can put it, as you know, on cars, on buses, on just about anything you can possibly imagine.  So, it’s a brave new world when it comes to signage, much more colorful, much more imagery.  

And lastly, I saved this from one of the DRUPA events, a Xerox event where they took your picture and then printed it and then it wound up in this little thing – did I do that right?  Yes, I did.  And there I am standing up.  By the way, this is a package, software package you can by and apply to digital printing.  And so you can send this to someone and their picture pops us.  That’s about a personalized as you’re possibly going to get.  

In any case, that’s some of the stuff I’ve saved because that’s my opinion.