In the trendy heartland of London's EC1 advertising community, colour is key. And while it is open for debate whether the average agency employee would know the first thing about ICC colour profiles, there can be no doubting the credentials of Loveurope group colour manager Ian Nunn. Originally headhunted to be the repro manager for Loveurope's in-house studio at global advertising agency McCann Erickson, Nunn took up his current role after instigating the adoption of GMG's ColorServer technology.

"We started working with GMG ColorServer in the McCann studio and, following the success of that, we decided to run it out of the hub at Goswell Road with all the studios accessing it remotely," says Nunn. "Before that, everything was done in Photoshop, which was much more time-consuming. GMG ColorServer is very consistent and a lot quicker, so it soon became obvious to everyone that that was the route to do our other work."

Having initially proven the benefits of the technology within the studio, Nunn, together with group IT manager Mark Smith, set about creating what has become a group-wide colour-managed workflow run out of the company's Goswell Road headquarters. Like many advocates of colour accuracy, Nunn is more concerned with consistent results than with perfect ones.

"Getting consistent colour - that is what colour management is all about," he says. "If you're printing the same advert in a newspaper and in Vogue, you can't always get the same result because you've got different stocks, different ink weights and different printing conditions to contend with, but you can get an acceptable result. You want to be able to achieve that time and time again. You want good colour, yes, but you also want consistent colour."

Backbone trilogy
In addition to GMG ColorServer, Loveurope uses Dalim Twist and Xinet's WebNative software to enable remote access and automated pre-flighting and colour conversion. This trilogy forms the backbone of the group's workflow. However, although the software has enabled a much faster workflow, it still has its limitations, the main one being the need to manually set up a new queue in Twist for every possible permutation required of the output file, which varies depending on the requirements of the publication in which it is to be printed.

In order to solve this potential bottleneck, Loveurope partnered with Specle on a product that could tag XMP data onto PDFs at the front-end, so that Twist can then dynamically route the file through ColorServer and back into itself to produce the required final file.

"Specle's original idea was to create a product within InDesign as a plug-in, but we get sent a lot of PDFs from clients that use Quark, so we needed a standalone application," says Nunn. Fortunately, Specle was already working on such a product in partnership with the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG).

Specle managing director Tom Beckenham says: "We'd been looking at developing a product for the GWG that was completely disconnected from any data source, which we were codenaming Ticket Machine. In the end, we abandoned the work with GWG, but we still had this project with Love, so we took what we had developed, connected up data to every single field and it ended up working really well and they've been using that for the project managers to create tickets and the operators to create files."

"The whole point of the Specle Ticket Machine is that we go away from having to set up queues," says Nunn. "They've linked our publisher database and Twist together and that's probably made the workflow about four times faster."
According to Nunn, the next step is to link STM with Loveurope's online booking system, rather than having the people who are booking the ads inputting the data manually into the Ticket Machine. "Anything to save a bit of time from manual input," he says.

Nunn's local project, which was similarly designed to "save a bit of time" at the McCann studio, has now become a company-wide way of working and led to Loveurope being awarded the Fogra certification for colour management, while getting all of Loveurope's staff singing from the same colour-accurate song sheet.

Still, Nunn is determined to keep driving the company forward to greater efficiency and more hands-off automation. "Further down the line there's the potential to link with Vio's Adsend because they also use GMG and Twist, so it's all the same technology," he says. "That would allow us to go auto all the way through."

Loveurope factfile
Headquarters London
Founded 1988
Staff 270
Production turnover £10m
Media billing turnover £67m
Annual growth expectations 15%
Key clients DDB, HP, Intel, McCann Erickson, Philips, Volvo