Part 1

RIT College of Imaging Art and Sciences

RIT’s College of Imaging Art and Sciences graduates about 600 students per year with design, print and photography majors. According to Frank Cost, Professor, Associate Dean of the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences, and Co-Director of the Sloane Printing Industry Center, students take a course sequence in digital printing that gives them exposure to variable data printing technology. Cost indicates that RIT has spent a significant amount of time and effort learning what the real applications for variable data are, including a strand of research available through its Sloane Printing Industry Center. He says, “We have done research into the tie-in to customer relationship management (CRM) and customized marketing programs that makes variable data printing of value. Our faculty is well informed about the challenges, current capabilities, what people have done in the marketplace—and what has been successful. They also understand what kinds of changes have to occur in the macro economy before variable data really takes off.”

Cost reports that RIT’s previous focus was almost entirely on the technologies for print and related fields, but they now realize that technology is only meaningful when people pick it up and do something with it. He says, “All of the promise of variable data was built on a premise that may or may not have been valid—these capabilities were offered to a market that didn’t ask for it. The same thing happened at the birth of digital printing. People weren’t asking for that either.”