What was the project? It’s two volumes of all Gilbert and George’s postcard art from between 1972 and 2009. Gilbert and George laid the book out themselves and I worked with them in the year leading up to printing, on separating the images out so that it would work well.

How was the job produced? The books were printed on Cantz’s Heidelberg XL 162, which is fantastically fast and accurate. The books were originally specified on a 150gsm coated paper, but when we were doing the machine tests, we decided to flick the sheet over to print both sides and only then do you see that there was massive show-through. So we found some 170gsm and 200gsm and ran that as well. That was back in the summer, so by the time the job hit in December, we knew exactly what we were doing

What challenges were overcome? It’s so much harder to print ‘paper’ than great big blocks of colour because it always looks wrong. We alternated the six different types of frame we had throughout the book, adjusting the shadows and reflections so they looked quite natural, then split the paper out as a background flat colour and printed that as a special with the four-colour work sitting in the middle.

Using the background colour made it run much more easily and allowed us to use much more interesting inks for the four-colour work, which hit their colour gamut better without needing to worry about trying to hold this balance. The books themselves weigh 11kg, so one of the biggest challenges was walking around London carrying the dummies to assess whether the carry case held them or not!