Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Florian Sussl, who is With Zipcon Consulting in Berlin. Right?

Florian Sussl: Yes.

Cary Sherburne: And maybe you could first tell us a little bit about Zipcon.

Florian Sussl: Yes, thank you very much. Zipcon Consulting is a consulting firm for the print media industry, so we serve both the print providers as well as vendors and print buyers as well. So it's a whole range from consulting down to implementation that makes us special.

Cary Sherburne: And your specialty within there?

Florian Sussl: My part is a technical part and I'm focused on things like PDF, color, workflow, proofing, stuff like that and quality assurance as well.

Cary Sherburne: Okay and prior to that you were with a design firm. Tell us a little bit about that.

Florian Sussl: That's right. It was a large design firm. It still is a large design firm, Meta Design and-

Cary Sherburne: Minus one.

Florian Sussl: Worked in the production department where we had to serve the designers as well as the printers doing jobs for Meta Design and my part there was to insure that the color was right from the design stage down to the end where the printed material is produced.

Cary Sherburne: Or someone said, from inspiration to perspiration.

Florian Sussl: Yeah, if you want.

Cary Sherburne: And so in both of those roles color measurement is actually a pretty critical part of what you do. Talk to me a little bit about how you managed that kind of thing.

Florian Sussl: It started in the design stage where we had to make sure that onscreen as well, so in the proofing, sort of proofing area as well as proofing on hardcopy proofs that the color is predictable and is in a way reliable, so that we could insure that once the designer signs off it will be as close as possible matched at the print stage.

Cary Sherburne: And what kind of tools do you use to do that because you can't just do it by eye.

Florian Sussl: Yeah, that's right. So we use the color tools like in Photoshop, so and within Photoshop the proofing parts and then the proofing was done with GMG and all the way from screen to the proof printing and later on as well when the printed sheets come, when we do test prints or production prints we had to do color measurement and this is where the i1 came in from X-Rite.

Cary Sherburne: The i1 Pro 2.

Florian Sussl: The i1 Pro yes.

Cary Sherburne: And so that allows you to take measurements of the color in various locations and make sure that it's consistent, right the first time, right every time.

Florian Sussl: Yes and there is one—not just within our company. It is also very important that it's a kind of de facto standard. So it wouldn't make sense, and this what we had as an experience, if firm one uses one device and firm B another device that you sometimes have disputes and you have to argue about numbers because they do not tell you the same figures. So it was a very, very good thing and this is why we like the I1 very much that almost all of the other partners use that device as well.

Cary Sherburne: Okay, yeah, so you had that continuity of the device across all the supply chain.

Florian Sussl: Yeah.

Cary Sherburne: That's great, terrific. Thank you.