They are therefore heavily reliant on their print suppliers to keep them informed of the range of embellishments that are available and the advantages that they offer. However, according to many trade finishers, this exchange of information rarely happens, especially when it comes to the more expensive finishes, for which the return on investment is harder to calculate.

The choice of the available finishes is almost endless, says Best Cover UV managing director Darren Crake, but the UK commercial print market tends to be a little bit blinkered to the existence of those finishes and I think a lot of that is down to the price constraints involved.

However, Celloglas sales and marketing director Steve Middleton says that printers are aware of the range of embellishments available, but that they choose not to pass on the information to the buyers. We tell the printers, but they just don’t bother telling anybody about it, says Middleton. I’ve started doing a lot of presentations direct to end-users and they [the buyers] say, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe all this is available. Why don’t my printers tell me about these things?’ So I think that’s half the problem.

However, if that’s just half the problem, Crake is the first to admit that it’s not just printers who are at fault. Finishers have been shooting themselves in the foot for years by overpricing exactly the kind of specialist value-added work that they would like to do more of.

As soon as people start mentioning that they want something special or something unique on their magazine cover or their literature or whatever it might be, print finishers tend to be a little bit guilty of adding zeros on the end of the quotation figure, says Crake.

If they’re the only people that can do it, then they’ll want to bump the price up, which is false economy as far as I’m concerned because you want to attract more people to use that product and boost your own revenue full stop.

Price hikes
Often, it is not even that the actual materials required – or the cost of producing a unique finish – are that expensive, but the fact that it’s potentially a one-off job means the temptation is there to set a one-off, margin-boosting price.

Richard Hunt, manufacturing director at Emap Inform, confirms: They probably do try and whack a bit more on, especially if there’s no chance of winning a repeat contract. Say it’s a one-off thing and therefore we only want a print run of 300-500, then the cost will increase because the quantity’s quite low and it’s specialist work.

Best Cover UV’s Crake agrees: From a finisher’s point of view, it’s because it’s not done that often, that they just bump the price right up. It’s something that’s been done for a long time and I want to try and get rid of that and try and encourage the end-user to use more of the finishes that are available and at the right prices.

Doing this means communicating directly with the buyers and designers who specify the work, in order to educate them on what can be achieved and at what price. Although this is a new practice for finishers, it is one that is being greeted with open arms by buyers and slowly but surely the amount of non-standard work being specified is increasing.

Most of the work we do is still standard, but I would say around 40% is specialist now because we’re getting out and meeting our customers direct, which is really encouraging them to experiment with new effects, says Celloglas’s Middleton. We are producing a lot more niche products, which is great for us.

Crake concurs that speaking to buyers has made a difference in the volume of non-standard work being specified, but adds that cost is still a problem. We’ve started trying to speak directly with the publishers to encourage them to use some of the specialist finishes that are available, but a lot of it can boil down to the actual coating that you use. Some of the scratch-and-sniff stuff for instance can be anything between £45 and £55 a kilo. Then you’ve got your glow-in-the-dark material, which can cost up to £180 a kilo and that can add massively to the cost of the job. The coating for one job cost more than £20,000 in varnish.

Face-to-face
Direct conversations with customers hasn’t been just a fillip for finishers, according to Meirion Pritchard, art director at Wallpaper*. He says that the increasing range of embellishments that are now being made available to customers is benefitting all parties. I think there is now a growing understanding and consensus within printing that the end users need to be surprised and delighted by printed matter. The tactility is something that digital media can never compete with. It used to be much harder asking for something different, now they are willing to give it a go, he says.

FINISHES: FOUR OF THE BEST
Laminations
These are basically bits of film that are applied onto print. There are the usual suspects – gloss, matt and semi-tone – but there are loads of different laminations out there. There is a pearlescent lamination, which can be used in conjunction with pearlescent foils and gives a really good effect; environmentally friendly laminations; a Fish Eye lamination, which has a 3D effect; and our own Cellomed lamination, which actively destroys MRSA. There are also holographic laminations; these are a bit like holographic foil, but with all the metal stripped out so it’s clear. You can apply it over print and then put spot UV over areas of the holographic lamination, which switches off the holographic pattern. So you take a bit of print, put the holographic lamination over the top of the print and then if you want to pick out some of the wording, you’d spot UV it and that would make the holographic pattern disappear.
Varnishes

Because a lot of coatings are applied silk screen this is where you can have a little bit of fun. The usual suspects are overall varnish, such as matt or gloss, and spot UV, but we’ve just introduced a textured varnish and a ‘high-build’ varnish, which provides an alternative to embossing. You can also get glow-in-the-dark, which store light through the day and release it in the dark, as well as heat-sensitive and light-sensitive varnishes. There are also silver-latex coatings that are used on scratch cards, fragrance bursts, which are used for scratch and sniff products, and pearlescent varnishes.

Foil
You can get foil, which is like a thin film, in different colours and you simply stamp it on wherever the customer wants it. To create special patterns a die is created, so if you want to put some texture in your supplier has to create that in the die itself. All the hard work is done in the die. Then we can obviously emboss that foil if we want to, to push it out, or push it in – deboss it. You can graduate it as well so it is vignetted rather than solid. We don’t produce the die, but we specified it and we provide the contact with the die maker.

Special products
The final option is Mirriboard, which is basically a range of foiled boards for printing on. We actually laminate what is in essence a piece of foil to a board and then sell it as a board and people print on it. This is really at the top-end of adding value – the programme for one of Kylie Minogue’s world tours was produced on Mirriboard. From a cost point of view, this is certainly quite an expensive material but you can print on it and you get some amazing effects. It’s seen as a little bit specialist but we sell an awful lot of it.

CASE STUDY: WALLPAPER
For those who are stuck in the ‘matt lam and spot uv’ rut, it’s worth looking at the impact that specialist print finishes can have. The Secret Elite July issue of Wallpaper* specified a light-sensitive ink following discussions between art director Meirion Pritchard and print finisher Celloglass.

We were originally looking at heat-sensitive inks, but for various reasons we went for the light-sensitive option, Pritchard says. It can be applied litho or screen. The screen method takes longer and is more expensive, but produces a better effect so we went for that option.

There are a few colours, but we chose purple. It gives a finish that is transparent and looks like a clear varnish when not in direct sunlight and which turns a deep dark purple almost instantly when exposed to UV light.

Pritchard says it was particularly apt to use a finish that is associated with security printing for the Secret Elite issue, as it reflected the editorial content.

While response to the special edition has been great, Pritchard recognises that the cost of specialist finishes is, if not prohibitive, then certainly worth consideration.

Anything that costs more than the standard CMYK process is going to require justification, he says. It’s also especially difficult when applying these special finishes to a large print run, not only from a monetary point of view but also a logistical one – it’s not always possible to apply these finishes across mass market titles without huge lead times.

On the other hand, Pritchard argues that the cost has the beneficial effect of making print buyers think more about what they’re specifying. If things were cheaper people might not properly consider if using a special finish was appropriate to the subject matter, he explains.

Special edition The Secret Elite
Publication date: July 2008
Printed: St Ives
Finishing: Celloglass
Specialist finish Photochromic Ink