After just a year in business, Kent repro company Suite Creative already has expansion in its sights. The company’s niche is the creation, production and delivery of advertisements, although it also offers a complete design-to-print service, and web design. Customers have included Littlewoods, Kays and Odeon. The goal is simple: every single file that leaves the studio will reach its destination in perfect condition and will appear in print exactly as the customer expects it to.
The repro company was formed by Matthew Kirtland and Richard Vaughan, former primary school friends, then repro colleagues at Atelier Dataset in Cornwall. They set out in the days when drum scanners were commonplace, and Cromalins and Scitex Rips were the tools of their trade. Colour manipulation was done by eye and only gradually did tools appear to make that process easier.
Vaughan was invited by Vio to set up its studio in 2005. He brought Kirtland on board and the project was successful until Vio restructured in July 2008 and had no need for the studio. Faced with a choice of looking for repro jobs in London or setting up on their own, they chose the latter path, and Suite Creative was born.
They knew from day one that they needed automation, allied to their expertise, and through the specialist reseller Xelix, Suite Creative invested in GMG colour software. GMG ColorServer allows them to automatically convert ads from one colour space to another, using GMG’s four dimensional colour management engine, which makes the colour conversion in CMYK rather than LAB. This means that there is no loss of image quality, and the accuracy ensures that there is no need to retouch the page, according to Xelix.
“You need a mix of skill, experience and automation to ensure the best possible job,” says Kirtland. “We have seen totally integrated, closed automated workflows, but in our opinion they still need people with the distinct knowledge to make checks along the way. If, for whatever reason, something not right slips through the system, you need someone who can spot that and flag it up.”
PDF files are difficult to change manually and GMG ColorServer allows them to go in and do a PDF to PDF conversion with perfect results. “What would have taken maybe an hour manually takes only 30 seconds and it is consistent and correct,” says Kirtland. GMG ColorServer is also used for repurposing images. If, for example, a customer has an image database comprising images for a catalogue that is to be printed on a certain press, then the whole database can be dropped in to ColorServer with the appropriate curves and settings in the evening, and the next morning all the images will be converted and correct, ready to use.
Every newspaper and magazine has its own bespoke curve created by Xelix and files are sent to match the exact specifications. Because of this, Suite Creative has been accredited by the Daily Telegraph, says Vaughan.
The cost and time savings for both Suite Creative and its customers are enormous. Vaughan points out that the insertion cost of an ad can be as much as £120,000, and adds: “To run it past us to make sure it is spot on may only cost £65. What we do is minimal spend to make sure that that ad is treated in the right way. By using us the client can be assured that the file that appears in print has been treated as well as it is possible to be treated.”
There are, of course, frequently issues with files. PDFs can be broken into, but this is akin to entering a minefield, with the potential to lose fonts or logos. ColorServer can fix these issues though, and also helps with the issue of ink weight, where images from digital cameras in the RGB colour space are then converted directly to CMYK, often with little regard for the printing press. The total ink coverage is often therefore not reduced to the 240% that is required, causing it to fail the publisher’s preflight check.
It’s an issue of lack of knowledge among designers about preparing files to the right specifications. “They can leave spot colours in there, and who knows what else, and that file is no good to the printer,” says Kirtland. “We cannot make the files any better than the original data but we can make sure that that data has been prepared properly for its destination.”
• www.suitecreative.com