HOW Design Live: Day One
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 09:36AM 
FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2011. Chicago is a great city! Being here for the HOW conference is even better. I have been extremely fortunate that my employers over the years value this conference as well! First up: "Escape the Tri-Fold Funk" from the founder of FoldFactory.com herself: Trish Witkowski. This was a fabulous seminar of nearly four hours of folding design and hands-on work (see photo for results). I lost my damn notes, unfortunately, so I'll need to try and track Trish down this a.m. for the list of URLs shared that were great folding and production resources. It's a pain-in-the-ass to come up with stuff that our regular producers' machines can't handle.
Some good info from NewPage with regard to online and direct-mail. There's plenty in the spiral-bound book I got from them, but here's some encouraging tidbits: 81% of American households open direct mail; Websites supported by catalogs generate 163% more revenue, than sites that aren't; and there's far more sustainable forestry with regard to the paper industry now than ever before. The studies were attributed to the USPS. Hey, if you can't trust the U.S. government, who can you trust?
Pantone, as usual, is upping their game. They recently introduced an upgraded color system: Pantone Plus and now they're rolling out a plethora of tools to support it.
Some new and interesting services: new, multi-format book production service called Blurb, a publication to digital assistance service called Mag+, the usual updates in digital printing technology (this time from HP), and Neenah has rolled out a "personal proof" system where a user can upload artwork to create a proof on their specified paper. Pretty cool.
More about today, tomorrow!