We have access to a great range of metallic effect papers and boards for covers and packaging. From funky holographic and etched foils backed onto card to sophisticated brushed metal -the selection is really extensive. The material to the left recreates the look of an industrial metal floor whilst the one below is a quite stunning patterned iridescent. It's available without the patterns but hard to convey in a photo! These would make amazing and unusual cover materials for a book.
Here we're showing more variations. Shimmering and iridescent finishes are always eyecatching and have the ability to make a title leap from the shelf! The matt metal finishes lend a slightly more sophisticated feel which combined with the right design could be breathtaking.
Whilst we at Imago have been blogging and tweeting for a short while now, we were acutely aware there was very much more still to learn. Not least of all how we can use it as a genuinely useful tool for our business rather than just something we ‘ought’ to be doing.
So here I am. Fresh from my social media for business course and brimming (or simmering) with ideas. You can expect to hear more from me in the coming months... What's really interesting is some of the facts and figures on social media users and whilst I won’t go into them all here, one thing is abundantly clear.... With virtually (pun intended) 50% of under 18s already using social media, the next generation are very much going to expect, nay demand it, as part of any business, service or product. And don't forget, a huge percentage of them are only a few short years away from being our future colleagues and customers. I am not yet old enough for the thought of being left behind in a technological haze to be acceptable. We must up our game!
The challenge remains of how to convert these tools into business tools. It's easier to see the appeal of keeping in touch with relatives and friends on the other side of the world and who can argue with the joy of a quick tweet with Stephen Fry, but how to generate an interest in what we have to say, because actually some of it is quite interesting! I've been assured today that networking sites are here to stay and whilst the brand may change, the essence will remain the same. Apparently it suits our natural human behaviour and our need to form 'tribes'. After all as our trainer points out, being sent to Coventry or solitary confinement has always a heightened form of punishment denying us all our need to communicate. These 'tribes' transcribe themselves into communities which form and appear all over the virtual world. If you look hard enough, you will find group of people discussing anything and everything. What we have to do is find these groups or start our own. Once you have decent content and something to offer a community will form, and from small roots grows great potential. As soon as your followers start to grow you will find with one simple post/tweet you are reaching far more people than you ever could have before and with significantly less effort and cost. 100 followers on Twitter is a modest sum but they can 'retweet' your information to all of their followers and so on and so forth, and so the viral marketing begins. Very often once a community grows large, you will find it manages itself. Questions and queries get answered from naturally formed leaders within the community and monitoring is the essence of what is required.
How this transforms itself for Imago, you will have to wait and see, but certainly, as a global company we have a massive wealth of experience and knowledge that most of our customers only get to skim the surface of.... So I am pretty sure we have plenty to say and hopefully, you'll enjoy finding out.
We don't often give too much thought to the process involved in carton markings and packing and shipping instructions are inevitably bottom of the list of priorities. However, it is useful to know that as we enter peak season, carton makers are also getting stacked up and unable to work as quickly as before.
In a dream world we should be supplying packing instructions with our POs but that is often simply not possible. At the moment in this peak season, the latest should be 2 weeks before ex works. That way we should end up with the cartons we want, labelled correctly and on time!
There is at last some bright news for shipping... container capacity on the Asia-Europe route, is set to increase dramatically over the coming months.
Maersk and CMA-C GM are to join forces and restore a service which was put out of action in November 2008. They have even upgraded the service from 9 vessels with 8,400 container (20ft) capacity to 10 vessels with 13,400 container capacity. And they are not alone, MSC plan to launch 39 similar capacity vessels over the next 3 years and other lines are starting to bring ships out of storage.
Not only is it hoped this will ease the capacity issue, it should also help to stabilize rates in the long term, which I am sure we would all welcome....
We have recently discovered this rather unusal but equally wonderful portable speaker system. This tiny device deploys highly effective vibrations to convert any flat, hard surface into a quality audio speaker.... for example, a box or a bottle or even a car! When used with a corrugated card, it delievers a great quality sound oozing with bass. Everything from pizza boxes to juice cartons can be transformed into a speaker and hearing really is believing!
You can watch the video here.
It's all go-go over Gaga this end as we launch into production of the new Lady Gaga illustrated biography for Essential Works.
One of the wonders of the modern age, the biography not only charts her life story through hundreds of fabulous photos, but also looks at the people who inspired the phenomena we know today as Lady Gaga.
Printing in China we are all set and ready to go and can't wait to see the finished result!
You can read all about it and get a sneak preview of the content here.
We are currently busily working away on our first augmented reality projects and it's a very exciting time for us!
We've had lots of meetings with our technology partners discussing all the options sat amongst the 3D TVs, black glasses and webcams and we are buzzing with the potential, features and capabilities of the media. Infact we are struggling to think of a book that would not be enhanced by augmented reality!
One thing that has come up is the possbility to 'retro fit' augmented reality into an existing title without the need to re-originate the entire book or large chunks of it. One of the requirements of augmented reality is a high contrast image to act as the trigger which is best as black and white. Printing loose cards which can be used interactively with the relevant page and incorporating them into the book can work really well and also means you don't need to have the book under the web cam to activate it. It’s also perfectly possible to recognise a 4 colour image and use this as the trigger but the costs are that much higher it's best avoided at the moment!
There is just so much we could talk about - and no doubt we will - but for the moment, feast your eyes on this beauty from BMW showcasing some of the best augmented reality to date.
Our new safety blog has successfully launched! Available on a subscription basis the blog will be updated monthly or more reguarly as events unfold, to bring you real time safety news relevant to the publishing industry and even giving sneak previews of the new regs to come! Our contributor is Diane Greaves, who many of you will know from Imago's Safety courses.
The initial take up has been good and the site is now only accessible to subscribers. If you would like to know more you can click on the image for a overview of the site or contact us here. Subscriptions are available on a yearly basis for £250 and with the continuously unfolding events of the new European Toy Safety Directive we plan to bring you the latest updates in layman's terms which we hope will prove genuinely useful.
What is Bookery you say? Well it’s the latest term coined by our Paris office to neatly summarise the current French trend for Cookery Books Plus!
We have produced some amazing sets for the French market and it seems to be very much on trend at the moment. There has been a huge increase in the number of ‘Coffrets’ (Box Sets) in the last couple of years, over a wide variety of subjects but most noticeably around the theme of cookery.
Here we're showing more variations. Shimmering and iridescent finishes are always eyecatching and have the ability to make a title leap from the shelf! The matt metal finishes lend a slightly more sophisticated feel which combined with the right design could be breathtaking. 
We don't often give too much thought to the process involved in carton markings and packing and shipping instructions are inevitably bottom of the list of priorities. However, it is useful to know that as we enter peak season, carton makers are also getting stacked up and unable to work as quickly as before. 
There is at last some bright news for shipping... container capacity on the Asia-Europe route, is set to increase dramatically over the coming months.
