The 15-staff outfit debuted its 'Vivid Colour' process on the recently-published The Act, a 300-run fine-art book by London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Boss managing director Fenton Smith was quiet on some of the finer details of the Vivid Colour process, which he has trademarked, but he said Boss had partnered with a third-party software supplier and a technical operator from supplier Service Offset Supplies.
Vivid Colour uses a five colour process, CMYK plus Violet, combined with stochastic imaging to produce high definition, photo-like image quality. Boss, which has used a stochastic printing process since it was founded 12 years ago, is about to send out a mailout to prospective new customers demonstrating the virtues of Vivid Colour, with the strapline CMYKV = RGB.
The Act was the first live job Boss has carried out using the process but Smith said there are a few more in the pipeline. Papers used were GF Smith's Colorplan, Heaven 42 and Cromatico, with Agenda Winner rubber on the cover, and the book was A3 landscape PUR and case bound.
“We didn’t sell this to the client, we were going to do the book anyway and since then we have evolved the Vivid Colour process; we did a test proof and it was amazing.
“Because this book is quite an interesting topic and the images are so great, it gives us the opportunity to talk about it, to revisit markets and maybe create some markets that aren’t there. The consensus is that print is going down a commodity-based route, it’s not getting better it’s getting worse, so this is raising the bar again, in our opinion anyway.”
Award-winning Boss has been involved with the printing of a number of high-profile design projects over the past few years and prides itself on working closely with clients over the entirety of the process.
It has printed Noted Notebooks for the past three years in a row, most recently Heidelberg Bound, in collaboration with design agency Carter Wong, and has also collaborated with Fedrigoni and designer Studio Sutherl& to produce its sample selector of different types of boxes.
Smith said: “We’ve been collaborating with people a lot, the industry has been a bit diffracted and people don’t do that enough.”
The Act was printed using Boss’ 12-year-old Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 74, which it runs along with an HP Indigo 5500 and a raft of finishing equipment.
“We are certainly going to present this to people that would really understand it and benefit from it, photographers that are frustrated because their work is never going to look like it does on screen, well this is very very close,” said Smith.
