When Stephen Coates and James Hunter designed the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Unearthed: Photography’s Roots’ at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, they decided to print the interior pages litho and the cover digitally on a silver Fedrigoni board Sirio Pearl Platinum using HP Indigo at Pureprint in Uckfield, England.
The cover is a detail from Large Poppies, a photograph by artist Richard Learoyd that posed extra challenges for colour matching because of the need to compensate for the colour of the metallic board. Coates explains that they employed five colours – four process plus white integrated into the image separations.
‘The white is printed first and used as a support for the process set but also used as a solid for the type,’ says Coates. ‘It actually uses four “hits” of white to build up the depth of colour. Somehow the four hits are built up within the press and only transferred to the paper once.’ Asked about the benefits of printing the cover this way, Coates replied: ‘We could proof it easily and on the same digital press as the final run. The printed result was made after two proofs with extra colour adjustments made on press. Printing litho (and therefore wet proofing) on a conventional press would have been prohibitively expensive.’
Project Details
Unearthed: Photography’s Roots
Published by Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2020.
Editor: Alexander Moore.
Design: Stephen Coates, James Hunter.
Printer: Pureprint, Uckfield, UK.
Machine: HP Indigo.
Board: Sirio Pearl Platinum, 300g/m2.