Graphic Arts Magazine May 2019 | Page 14

Creative & Design Artist chooses printer for his unique wallpaper designs Designer break rules in new poster exhibition A new digital printing system from Durst is the impetus behind a £1million investment by an entrepreneur who’s relocating his unique wall covering design and printing business from Hong Kong to Nottingham in the UK, to grow markets across Europe and the US. David Qian’s exclusive wallpaper designs retail on average for about £150 per sq. m. and are customized for major brands that include numerous five-star hotels worldwide. His £3 million/year business includes made-to-order hand-paintings and embroidered wall coverings that combine ancient eastern artistic traditions with western and contemporary aesthetics. D’Arts, Qian’s digital printing brand, is unique because traditional hand painting adds artistic touches to the high print quality he achieves from his Durst Rho P10 160 industrial flatbed printer. “We’re the only company in the world that can combine hand-painting and digital printing to create bespoke customer designs for major brands in the interior design David Qian with one of his exclusive and furnishing sectors.” wallpaper designs Dispa Recyclable Paperboard comes to Canada 3A Composites’ Dispa Graphic Display Board is a uniquely laminated paper that’s 100% recyclable and is now available in the Americas. It consists of an embossed-formed paper core that’s laminated on both sides with a bright white smooth surface. “This unique composition makes this paperboard lightweight yet extremely rigid, strong and dimensionally stable,” said the manufacturer. Signs created with Dispa stay flat and are easy to handle and hang. Dispa is manufactured with 100% FSC-certified paper that’s fully recyclable. Its flat, smooth surface offers excellent printability in both digital and screen-printing applications, and is available in 48” and 60” widths for large-format printing. It’s easy to fabricate, even with hand tools, can be die- cut and CNC-routed, and is ideal for pre-printed, double-sided offset- litho sheet lamination. The new substrate is aimed at shor t-term promotional campaigns, POS and POP displays, hanging signs, window displays, tradeshow displays and exhibits, 3D displays, and high- end packaging. Singapore-based designer Darius Ou (whose design project Autotypography sprang to life after he found himself bored at school) began illustrating a poster a day to create a visual autobiography of his daily life. The project went viral when he posted the images to his website. Ou’s work breaks the rules of so-called good design by stretching, deconstructing and experimenting with typography. “Along the way I began to experiment with aesthetics,” he said, “and the project became an inquiry into the current state of visual culture. Through this exercise, I learned a lot about myself and eventually formed my practice.” His collection of 365 posters, created using a variety of Adobe software solutions, were printed and showcased as part of the Dissolving Margins exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Singapore. Ou needed a durable paper material that would print high quality with bright colour saturation, yet adhere well to the walls of the gallery and still allow for possible reposi- tioning during installation. The p os ter s were printed on an HP Latex 360 using H P PVC- free, pre-pasted wallpaper. From Darius Ou’s Autotypography (Exhibition 4) Markzware releases reseller resource for Adobe InDesign users Markzware (Santa Ana, CA), a leader in desktop publishing and data-conversion tools, has published a 39-page resource for resellers of desktop publishing software. Its 2019 Markzware Dealer Sales Guide is a free publication to assist dealers, resellers and consultants to help their customers with workflow issues. “With this sales guide, we help resellers not only with how to purchase a Q2ID (Quark to InDesign plugin) or FlightCheck (standalone pre-flight and packaging), but also how to educate and market to the dealer’s customer base of potential Markzware users,” said David Dilling, Channel Manager at Markzware Europe. One popular plugin featured in the guide is PDF2DTP that can convert multiple PDF files to Adobe InDesign for easy text editing. A single menu selection within InDesign enables the PDF data conversion. Dilling added that many resellers were not aware of how easy it is to market and ultimately sell PDF2DTP. To request the Markzware Dealer Sales Guide e-mail [email protected]. Dispa Graphic Display Board sample 14 | May 2019 | GRAPHIC ARTS MAGAZINE graphicartsmag.com