“We wanted to show what is possible with print and paper,” says Fedrigoni Paper UK’s marketing manager Ambra Fridegotto. It’s a challenge that began six years ago and which has now culminated in the the 2024 edition of the paper company’s 365 project. This is the most complex to date, amounting to a huge challenge for all involved.
It is fair to say that Fedrigoni and team have nevertheless succeeded, pushing the barriers of what is possible with print technology to its limits. This involved HP Indigo where Emea industrial marketing lead Andy Pike says: “We have worked with Fedrigoni before, but this year is the most complex they have ever created. It’s about making print that is too good to throw away.”
That too was the ambition of others involved in production of the 2024 edition. But that is rushing ahead. What has been achieved this year is the culmination of the journey to market the Italian made paper in a new way. This started several years ago.
Fridegotto says: “We had always produced a desk calendar for customers. Then in 2017 we approached the TM Design agency for ideas about the 2018 edition. They came back saying that conventional desk calendars were being replaced by people using their mobiles or setting up meetings on Teams. The conventional desk calendar was not needed any more.”
Instead the agency proposed something altogether more ambitious – a book with each of the 365 days as the responsibility of a different designer. Six years on that concept, of showcasing what individual designers can do, remains central to the vision. Only now it incorporates far more than 365 designers and 365 static pages thanks to what is possible thanks to digital printing and some powerful and clever software.
The first attempt to accommodate digital print came with the 2021 edition, printed by Ricoh using the additional colour possibilities of the Pro C7200. The algorithm combined different fixed designs to produce books that were individually unique. “Being able to include more people is more exciting,” Fridegotto says.
A different combination of designers resulted in each book being completely unique. As the publication was put together during the height of the pandemic and lockdowns, it was also a fillip to designers who might be isolated at home with few commercial jobs to work on. Fedrigoni felt it was possible to highlight their work, both in print and online, through using social media. As a consequence this is no longer a conventional relationship between client and service provider, designers and paper company are bound together.
She explains: “This is becoming a real community led project, with our Instagram feed showing the page from that day for example.” The project has also broken across national boundaries to become known around the world, wherever Fedrigoni products are sold.
Each year the challenge has been different, using a different inspiration from Fedrigoni’s range of papers. Thus the theme of Love drove the 2023 edition using ten shades of red paper; different styles of binding across four volumes inspired 2022. The consistent message has been about encouraging designers to think beyond their normal boundaries. This has certainly been the case for 2024.
Planning for this leap year edition began 12 months ago between TM Design and Fedrigoni and printer FE Burman as the chosen print partner. The aim was to push the creative possibilities of the HP presses that FE Burman has. This is meat and drink to the printer’s sales director Paul Regan. “At FE Burman we love unique things. When people print the same thing on 1,000 sheets of paper, it really bugs me. Print doesn’t have to look the same every time,” he says.
The business is synonymous with delivering high impact printed projects with a touch of panache or ‘je ne sais quoi’, whether through choice of materials, print or finishing techniques. But even for FE Burman, what Fedrigoni was planning to do would push the boundaries.
Many ideas were tabled but rejected before the concept of of using the set of tools in HP’s Smart Stream designer to build unique pages was settled. Mosiac has been used to create labels for vodka brands, by sampling a small part of the original artwork, then another sample from a different part of the image to create a series of labels that have a coherent design but are each different. This is straightforward with one changing element, it becomes less so as more elements are changed as TM Design wanted to do. To make this work, the designers had to work in vector formats for the Mosaic application to take the artwork and play with it. The agency’s director Danny McNeil says: “We wanted to exploit the creative possibilities of HP presses. This would be a huge feat of production. Mosaic had never been used at this scale before.”
The brief to designers focused on creating numbers for 365 days throughout the year. They would be printed in CMYK with the addition of Indichrome Orange or Indichrome Green as a highlight colour. FE Burman would print 3,000 copies, half with one special colour, half with the other on nine of Fedrigoni’s papers.
It amounted to 2 million different combinations for the days of the year. The first attempt to crunch a single B2 sheet, each with 16 pages to view, on a desktop Mac at FE Burman resulted in a crash after five or six hours of number crunching. The computer’s logs revealed that the file had only been 40% of the way through processing at the time.
HP Indigo’s cloud hosted servers would be needed and these delivered imposed sheets for print in around 30 minutes a section. Once on press the job flew through relatively speaking, taking two hours to print the 3,000 copies.
“This has been the biggest and hardest project we have worked on,” says Regan. “We are fortunate to be in central London and so have creatives all around us because one of the steep learning curves is for a printer to be able to understand creativity.” Communication and understanding, or the lack thereof, is still a fundamental problem.
Production issues, scheduling and costs always get in the way and designers, who have already been forced to compromise to suit client wishes, end up compromising a little more.
This has been one of the advantages of the Fedrigoni project: there is no commercial client to satisfy so designers can create something that is purely about themselves. “They get total freedom to design what they like,” says Fridegotto, “which is totally unlike working for a commercial client. They have complete freedom so long as it’s not offensive, which is pretty rare for any designer.”
Unsurprisingly those designers are in the main UK based. But not all. The growing reputation of the 365 project has meant copies end up around the Fedrigoni network and copies can be sold with proceeds for charity. There have been requests to involve others from Fridegotto’s equivalent in other parts of the network. “This year we chose 60 people from 19 different countries beyond the UK,” she says. “That of course meant even more project management work, but it does help our marketing efforts in those countries.”
The marketing effort in this country included for the first time a two-day launch event held in Islington. Previously there has been a launch in a gallery space, a few cocktails and thank you, goodnight. This remained, though over two nights, thanks to using the Craft Centre close to The Angel. It meant that Fedrigoni could invite designers in and give a brief seminar about how the project was put together as well as using the extensive wall space to display deconstructed versions of the project.
One aspect that went even further was the design for 29 February. This has been printed in a separate sheet was in the hands of Oswin Tickler, who describes himself as a designer-educator, but who is also fascinated by the possibilities of technology and used lockdown to explore this further by teaching himself to code. It resulted in a book project, Our Algorithmic Lives, which failed to achieve the deserved impact because of the pesky pandemic. However, the work was not wasted. The program he developed to create designs from no more than a set of instructions and inputs with no further intervention from the human designer, did attract interest and it has become HP Spark. It has been put through its paces on other projects at FE Burman notably creating the programmes for the three Bafta award ceremonies for films, television and computer games.
For the Fedrigoni project Tickler allowed the algorithm to come up with designs for the leap year day, having set a number of points for the program to use, removing any that were unintelligible or otherwise unusable. These were then printed on Fedrigoni’s Sirio Ultra Black, first with a white and then the orange or green on top.
Tickler worked alongside Guy Bibi, HP Indigo’s head of creative, as well as FE Burman to make it work. Bibi says that HP refined what Tickler had created, increasing capacity for example. That increased the speed of processing, slicing one-third off that time by 2022. “People can take and adapt a design without knowing about how to work with code,” Bibi says.
He sees further applications in packaging work where the time a box has to attract a consumer’s attention has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds now, and now brands must contend with the emergence of GenZ, the first generation to have spent its entire life online. “People are looking for brands that speak their language,” he says.
They are also looking for something that is unique, which is where Fedrigoni, FE Burman and HP Indigo align neatly. Pike says that from the outset HP Indigo was in support of the ideas behind the project. This is where proposals around the special inks and the creative software came in. “It’s about us wanting to educate the designers as to what is possible using the technology,” he says. “How otherwise can designers and agencies ‘learn’ about the special effects than having this sort of product? This is print that you feel is too good to throw away.”
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