NEW YORK--Aug. 18, 2003--A team of students at the Parsons School of Design conceived, created, produced and distributed a 52-page, full-color campus-life magazine in just eight weeks, using digital printing technologies from Xerox Corporation. Had the students relied upon traditional offset printing methods instead, time and funding would have limited them to producing only a mock-up design of the publication, PS Magazine. Published last week, PS Magazine's rapid "time-to-newsstand" was achieved by eliminating many production steps through the use of digital photography, Adobe PDF files for proofing and print submission, and a digital color press for printing. The efficient workflow was jointly specified by the student team that developed the magazine and Global Document Solutions Corporation (GDS), the New York-based print and outsourcing solutions provider that printed the publication on their Xerox DocuColor iGen3™ Digital Production Press. "The creation of PS Magazine simply wouldn't have been possible over an eight-week period without the DocuColor iGen3 and digital workflow," said Michael Josefowicz, acting associate chair, Communication Design Department, Parsons School of Design. "Our young designers are embracing these new digital technologies and accomplishing some startling and breakthrough work quickly. It changes the class completely." Josefowicz is a teacher in the Language of Production class. A team of nine sophomores developed PS Magazine as a final term project to fill a void on campus -- there were no school-wide publications dedicated entirely to the voice of the student. The magazine was first published in Fall 2002, appeared again this month and is now under consideration for school financing as an ongoing periodical. The student team contributed much of the publication's writing, photography, ad sales, design and layout, and the team developed and managed a network of contributors for the rest. They selected GDS to produce an initial print run of 150 magazines for the first issue. Advertising sales covered most of the on-demand printing cost. By specifying a nearly all-digital workflow process, the students roughly halved the magazine's production time, from two weeks to six days. Only three process steps were required -- electronic submission of the magazine's layout as a print-ready PDF file, review of proof samples, and final printing -- compared to as many as 15 steps in traditional printing processes. "As Michael Josefowicz likes to say, you don't get proofs from the iGen3, you get 'samples,'" said William Martin, document solutions specialist, Global Document Solutions, who worked closely with the students on PS Magazine. "That alleviates a lot of aggravation in graphic arts communications about what colors will look like on press, and it's one of the selling and client services points that is opening up new opportunities for us." The DocuColor iGen3 press offers image quality that compares favorably to offset, while enabling economical production of short runs that are not cost-effective on traditional presses. The DocuColor iGen3's 100 pages-per-minute operating speed is unmatched among cut-sheet color digital presses. "Like many DocuColor iGen3 customers, these students learned that digital technologies do things traditional presses can't, and it transformed their class project into a real-world experience," said Tom Wetjen, vice president and general manager, Xerox Worldwide Graphic Arts Industry Business. Parsons School of Design, a division of New School University in New York, is one of the largest degree-granting colleges of art and design in the nation. Currently enrolled are about 2,400 undergraduate students, 500 graduate students, and 2,500 non-degree students from all 50 of the United States and from 60 countries. Global Document Solutions Corporation, with headquarters in lower Manhattan since 1906, provides a wide range of high-volume document production and distribution services, printed or digital, domestic or international, through five integrated companies and affiliate sites in 35 countries.