My good friend Paul Foster does new business development for creative companies under the name, Billion Dollar Babies. He's very good at what he does and is quite clear about his proposition–to get them meetings they wouldn't get themselves at a fraction of the cost of hiring new business people full time.

There's all manner of companies offering business development services of varying quality, so Paul wanted something that was irresistably arresting and that went to the heart of their ambition–growing their business and making money. Hence, the idea of printing on a real dollar bill. Since his business is calling other people, we deliberately left off any contact numbers, so they get the mailer and wait for his call, thus getting the authentic experience of his approach.

The bills were letterpressed at Axminster Printing–a small local print shop in Devon–and they kindly took some fantastic photographs of the bills on their small Heidelberg press.

Putting the bills on a printing press makes another association we were keen to invoke–that of printing money–the outcome hiring Billion Dollar Babies can make to any of its clients.

The notes were sent out in US-sourced envelopes, with their distinctive yellow-manila colour and a Royal Mail airmail sticker just for laughs. Oddly, American stationery shops don't make envelopes to exactly fit their currency, which meant we had to trim the dollar bills a millimetre or so–and putting a wad of cash under a two-tonne guillotine is a sobering sight.

Paul doesn't have a URL for client-confidentiality reasons, but if you're interested in hiring him, he can be contacted at paul[at]billiondollarbabies[dot]biz

I'm doing some work with GlassesDirect and had the opportunity to get a guided tour around their dispatch facility in Swindon last week. Aside from the mind-boggling complexity of their operation–hundreds of frames, dozens of lenses, myriad prescriptions–the sunglass side of the business, SunglassesShop revealed a remarkable and charming insight into how factories work.

The pick-and-pack boxes are marked by brand, but not with the computer generated label you would expect. Instead the staff have taken the time to hand-draw the logos on each box to speed navigation around the hundreds of brands they hold.

Though driven by a remarkably pragmatic solution to factory-floor problem, what results is a charming post-modernist take on the high-gloss over-designed nature of fashion-brandery.

Went down to the fifth iteration of Mick Jones's Rock n Roll Library, which is currently on at the Subway Gallery–a former shoe repair kiosk in what is now called the Joe Strummer Subway (because he used to busk there) at Edgware Road tube station (Bakerloo).

Jones has famously amassed an enormous amount of stuff in his career, but this seems to go beyond passive collecting. This particular collection–less haphazard and over-crowded than previous versions–had a sort of war theme to it, but then again it didn't. As you would expect, it provided a fascinating insight into Jones's mind–here is someone who just adores physical stuff and with his fellow curators, is able to use them to tell a rich and fascinating story that's both a outward commentary on culture and inward perspective on Jones himself.

It's a curious mixture that you're constantly wondering about how carefully it's been put together. There are items that are obviously related to The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite and others that are obviously chosen for the casual war theme, just as there items that tell a story and others that don't. Below are Kate Moss's boots from the Glastonbury festival and above, some tins of London Fog to promote BAD (probably in America)

Here's a ViewMaster of Graceland, kind of what you'd expect from a Rock N Roll collector.

And here are these exquisite cowboy scatter cushions in a kind of needlepoint fabric.

One of the more interesting aspects of the show is the cultural recycling that goes on. Below, is a screen-printed patch of the cover shot from the first Clash album, sewn onto a tartan shirt. When The Clash first burst on the music scene in 1975, they wore paint-splattered and patchwork hand-made clothes (care of Mr Sebastian Conran, no less), which Vivienne Westwood also did for the Sex Pistols. The Clash never had pictures of themselves, this was something that was copied years later by blue-haired Mohican punks who lived in unfashionable parts of the home counties.

Another curious item was this pizza box. The Clash enjoyed almost unique fame and notoriety in New York, but the idea that someone would want to immortalise them on a fast-food container says more about their status than a whole pile of press-clippings.

Their first nationwide tour in May 1977 saw them a bit more organised and Bernie (Rhodes, their manager) had obviously gotten some money from CBS to get them proper gear. I can remember being quite surprised at the time that they all had matching fluorescent pink (faded now) transit cases for their guitars and amps. The original punk movement was never quite as from-the-streets as it seemed–it was the brainchild of some formidable creative talents like Malcolm Mclaren, Vivienne Westwood, Sebastian Conran, Bernie Rhodes as well as all the bands, who all emerged from the leading London Art schools and have since proved their ability to shape culture in powerful and sophisticated ways.

Another interesting item was this Ghetto Blaster. When the Clash went to the US in 1979, they refused to be photographed without a huge wardrobe-sized boombox, sometimes on their shoulders like they were listening to the latest test-match scores. This seemed faintly embarrassing–even more so if you consider that the hot technology at the time was the revolutionary Sony Walkman which allowed you to genuinely–without back-breaking discomfort nor being a public nuisance–listen to music on the move. Unfortunately, the Sony Walkman had been co-opted by a different branch of youth-culture–disco and dance–and wasn't seen as very Rock N Roll. The Clash were slow to pick up on this and didn't notice that the cool kids in London were sweating away in Greek Street basements listening to 70's disco hits and not post-punk rock n roll. When they did realise, they made Rock The Kasbah–one of their biggest hits, ironically–and the ghetto blasters quietly disappeared. This one carries Futura's signature, who was one of the first wave of late-70's hip-hop Graffiti artists and actually managed to enjoy his own retrospective and second-coming when Graffiti came round again in the late 90's.

The obligatory, though nonetheless impressive wall-of-fanzines–probably the last time that the UK produced an ouvre of graphic output that didn't involve graphic designers–something the publishers couldn't afford and so simply drew them with felt-pens. Stand up Danny Baker, this means you.

You get the feeling that only Mick Jones could happen upon a yellow vinyl disc of The Ballad of Davy Crockett.

The front cover of The Clash eponymous first album is taken in what is now part of Camden Lock Market, next door to their rehearsal studios, which was called Rehearsals Rehearsals, of which this is not the original sign but a later copy.

All in all, it's a very interesting exhibit. It's much more than the random collection of detritus that you might see at a modern art installation, though it hints at much the same observation–a window into the mind of someone with a very unusual eye and an ability to collect almost anything. What makes it so much more engaging–for me, anyway–was the cultural context of being something I recognised.

It's also fascinating from an object-language point-of-view. These are all items–many of them quite everyday items–that are telling quite complex and sophisticated stories (the pizza box being a good example) about their origins and the culture they came from.

Dave Lewis, MD at Clinic, brought this book into the office the other day, all about the huge trains that roam the American landscape. Neither books on trains, nor on American landscapes-or even on both–are unsual or particularly gripping (unless you're into either or both), but what makes this one work is the format of the book–quite simply its elongated landscape format that's so fitting to the trains that ribbon the landcsape.

Finally, I managed to send the new ARTOMATIC mailer out. I know it's always difficult doing your own stuff because, well, it's talking about yourself, but I've taken an inordinate amount of time producing these–mostly spent writing the words. Which brings up an interesting thought...

Nowadays, with blogs, tweets etc. we all do nothing but talk about ourselves but there's something about committing ink to paper that makes me at least, much more vexed about what words to use and what order to put them in.

As with so much of this analysis of print vs the digital, this seems so blindingly obvious–well of course you're going to think harder about what you say in print than what you say on-line–but if you widen the perspective to the media landscape in general–and imagine that my attitude to this is representative–it tells us that the nature of digital communications differs fundamentally from printed matter.

So, if you get one of these and you bother to read it (and this), please spare a thought for how much torture went into writing it.

When ARTOMATIC was around before, we were pretty much alone in doing the complex, creative work because the printers had enough straightforward work to keep them busy and anything overly ambitious clogged up their factories. It's different now–as the regular work has dried up, many printers have embraced creative ambition. As I debated (with myself) whether to return to production, wondering what value I'd really add in today's market, this project came along and made me realise I did have something to offer after all. This  project is probably the most complex thing ARTOMATIC has produced since we did the PS2 media kit in 1995.

Sony Computer asked Harriman Steel to design the media kit for the new VITA hand-held unit and to show off its host of new features–cameras, touch screens, extra buttons etc. Harriman Steel's idea was a secret book that tantalisingly revealed, one-by-one, the features of the unit before revealing the unit itself. They also wanted to showcase some of the games that would be available on the new platform.

The starting point had to be the VITA unit and its dimensions would dictate the overall thickness of the book. Knowing how much content we had (64 pages), gave us a target page thickness of 1,000 microns…and a headache. It’s too thick for conventional book binding, which only goes to heavyweight paper, circa 170gsm.

The alternative was a children’s board book that normally has pages 2 – 3 mm thick, but we knew we could be made thinner. Board books are now all made in China, which wouldn’t work timing-wise, and getting a bookbinder in the UK to make them would be prohibitively expensive. So, to solve the inevitable time / money problem, we thought about the raw materials used in a board book–folding boxboard, die cutting and glue–and realised they’re exactly the same in food packaging.

 The dummies gradually got better...this was about the fourth evolution

So, rather excitedly, I called David Braun, MD of R. Howard in Lincolnshire, who works in the middle of cabage fields in Lincolnshire.

Cabbages not in season when this photo was taken

I’d worked with him on the Pocketgame / Matterbox project for Cadbury and outlined the how I thought we could do it. He was somewhat perplexed by the idea of making a book, but said he’d look at it and a week later, came down to London with a rough mock-up. I then called Sean from Apollo to see if he could make the covers and turn it into a final book.

We spent an inordinate amount of time getting the pages to turn through the whole book.

Board books are perplexing at the best of times: they’re single sided sheets glued on the reverse so each spread is a true spread–no gutters–which gives them their strength and makes them toddler-proof. Because there are no end-papers–the covers are glued to the reverse of the first and last pages–which means the even numbered pages are on the right-hand side.

Printing the reverse of the sheet gave us the chance to vary the cut-outs deliberately

Initially we’d thought we’d glue it automatically in 4pp sections (2 spreads joined at the fore-edge, 8pp in a normal book) and collate and assemble the books by  hand. The initial dummies showed how problematic that was going to be in lining up the die-cuts. Harriman Steel came suggested we make the cutouts uneven sizes back-to-back and print on the reverse of the sheet to make it look deliberate. This only added to the confusion since it made the backs of the pages exist in a way they don’t in a board book normally.

Not much spare room on here, then!

There was further confusion over the size of the book, which required two sets of bleed to accommodate the fact we were producing it oversize prior to binding and then trimming once the book-blocks were glued. We had suggested shrinking the book to make it economical on the sheet, but with the VITA unit being the size it was, there wasn’t a lot of room and we ended up using every last millimeter on the B1 sheet.

The book starts as you would expect...

It was always going to be produced in multiple languages, which we mitigated by limiting the linguistic variations to one special colour with common CMYK. Sony didn’t have enough units for all the books, so two separate configurations of book emerged–another, paginated differently using the same pages and without the cut-outs, would be used without the units. Thus emerged one of the more amusing aspects of the project, the naming convention of WITH books and WITHOUT books, which led to all manner of confusion with phrases like "the WITH books with covers".

Set up its promise...

The product was launching mid-February and by mid-December we still had no artwork and hadn’t fully resolved the cover. We’d moved from a flush board cover with cloth spine to a conventional case-bound cover, which kept the book together without relying solely on the pages being stuck together. The need for strength had created another problem–because the book was made from folded sheets at the spine, it was thicker at the spine than at the fore-edge, which meant it wouldn’t have animated the scanimation planned for the cover and sleeve interaction. Moving to a case-bound cover allowed us to score the reverse of the text spreads and even up the thickness of the book from spine to fore edge. Phew!

and then revealed the new external features..

The artwork showed up just before Christmas and we scheduled it in for printing in January. With projects as complicated as this, it’s not the actual doing of it that takes the time, it’s the planning–it took another week before it actually hit the presses.

...one by one

Ordinarily a job like this would have to be done sequentially, with every stage tested and signed off before moving onto the next. But that would mean 8 weeks production and we had to start deliveries in the 3^rd week of January–and at the end of the first week of January, still no ink had hit any paper. It’s possible to speed things up considerably by bringing all the processes in parallel with each other–making everything at the same time. The disadvantage with this is that it’s very risky and I could sense Harriman Steel getting nervous. I didn’t blame them.

In the first days of January, the covers still weren’t resolved–the hinges had to be a specific length to allow the book to open properly and the change to scored backs late on changed the dimensions of the book and thus the covers. As soon as we had an acceptable cover design that worked (i.e. opened and the pages turned) we sent it off for the sleeve to be made. Sleeves can be notoriously tricky, since they have virtually no tolerance between being too baggy and too tight. You’d really rather make it from a production book than a prototype.

Then, as you turned the pages...

Sat in his factory in the middle of the Lincolnshire fens, David Braun contemplated what he could really achieve even if everybody worked 24 hours a day for two weeks. Then, he thought a bit more and worked out he could collate and glue the books together on his window-patching machine, which meant the laborious element was removed from the equation and he could print, die-cut, fold, collate and glue all at similar speed.

 ...it showed the games available...

Midway through January, we had books being printed, cut, collated, covers being made and sleeves (and shippers) in production all simultaneously. Harriman Steel were understandably nervous since they’d not seen anything yet. I was calmer–I knew we had everything covered. We had a bit of scare when the first sleeves and books arrived–they looked they might be too tight, but in fact it turned out to be the gloss laminate sticking to the inside of the sleeve. Making the sleeves up with softer creases cured it nicely.

...gradually revealing more of the unit... 

The downside to parallel manufacturing is that you don’t see anything until it’s finished. The upside is that it’s very quick. I showed Harriman Steel the first finished books only days before we started delivering them (which was either good or bad depending on whether you were them or me). To mitigate any further delays, we sent books into the fulfillment house the moment they were finished so they could dispatch them immediately.

 As the pages turned, the unit remained in the book

So, a lesson in how to truncate schedules or a lesson in how to age prematurely and increase your blood-pressure? Probably both. I’m sure Harriman Steel would err on the latter–they missed out on all the vital controls that designers crave and I’m sure from their perspective it wasn’t pleasant. I felt for them. Sorry, chaps.

 Food packaging often carries embossing, so we were able to emboss the image of the the unit while it was die-cut, so the only additional cost was the cost of the embossing dies

For me, it vindicated something I’ve learned over many years of producing really complex print work–provided you’re confident in what the designers and the client are trying to achieve and you can match that with your confidence in your supply chain, it’s possible to make it all separately and bring it together at the end.

That said, it’s only the product that counts and stories aside, I don’t think it could be better. It fits the VITA unit perfectly, it lines up with the controls; the pages turn with elegance and it shows the VITA off magnificently.

One interesting and unforeseen upside is the quality of the colour-work–it leaps of the page and appears almost liquid in its vibrancy. That’s because people who print food all day long really know about colour.

So, two lessons have been learned: 1) it seems there are still some complex, scary jobs that need real understanding, vision and determination to pull off, and 2), I'm convinced we can make just about anything in a food-packaging factory. My sincere thanks to everyone involved.

Here's a lovely little thing I came across the yesterday, in a junk shop in Margate. It's a spin-wheel calculator to help you convert decimal currency to old shillings and pence. This is going to be pretty meaningless to anyone who's much under the age of 50.

The UK introduced a decimal currency on Feb 15th, 1971...I remember the confusion and the mental arithmetic that went on almost constantly–I suddenly became much more useful to my parents because I could figure it out quicker than they could.

Clearly this was produced AFTER Feb 15th, though. It only converts from Decimal to old-money and not the other way around, so was probably produced in an attempt to reduce the confusion.

This is a tale of development. The set consists of ten CDs and the original thought was to do a perspex cube with each of the CD's held horizontally like a plan chest. This proved to be extortionately expensive, so we went back to a project we did for Alexander McQueen in 98, which consisted of a CD held between two thick perspex discs screwed together on a spindle. All we had to do was extend the spindle to hold ten CD's and interleaved paper (carrying the track listing, one for each disc).

So far so good. We got a prototype made and although it didn't hold enough CD's, it was good enough to start working on something to put it in. We started to think about jewelry packaging and with a bit of on-the-spot box design arrived at a lift-off lid box with a foam insert to present the CD set at a flattering angle.

Though Mute had not given us much of a steer on budget, when we showed it to them–not entirely unexpectedly–they suddenly managed to come up with a figure much smaller than the cost of the box. So, back to the drawing board and Martyn had said he wanted something clear and still jewel-ish and art-ish. The next idea was to mount the CD set in a kind of plinth inside a clear box.

Though the cost was much less, it didn't really look the part. The plastic for the box, unfortunately, has a language of cheap-goods-from China and not the art-piece association we'd hoped for. It's always a challenge–especially when quantities are small and there's not the volume to ammortise the origination costs–to get the right signals from the materials you can afford.

So, last Wednesday, I found myself with Malcolm once more sketching and plotting how we create something that references art, is reverential to the product (still in the perspex, thankfully), and costs less than it looks. We think we may have something, but we'll know more next week when we meet Martyn.

To be continued...

Despite the obvious connection–it was the London College of PRINTING–I was still taken aback to come face to face with a B2 4 colour Heidelberg press sitting on parquet flooring on the third floor of a London University in Elephant & Castle. Ten years ago, there were thousands of presses in obscure, cramped city-centre buildings, but most have closed or moved out to windy industrial estates in obscure post-codes 'inside the M25'.

Sadly, the LCC no longer runs a proper print course producing trained machine minders. Instead, it teaches digital and DTP skills and keeps the press for students to print their own work. I was equally amazed that students could actually use this machine with only an introductory workshop–though I suspect running was an overstatement and the skilled technicians were never more arm's-reach away.

There was a strange and powerful sadness to the idea that London's principle printing college no longer teaches printing–a bigger kick-in-the-teeth than the digital obsession that's fixating the marketing community nowadays. If there's nobody training to become printers, who's going to run the machines? Unlike letterpress machinery, which has found a grass-roots base to keep it going, colour litho printing isn't really within the realms of hobbyists–a 60 foot long 8 colour press won't fit in a garden shed.

The generation of designers coming through the college now, have grown up without print being part of their daily lives; their relationship with it is different. It's not a necessary part of their visual vocabulary and needn't ever be part of their careers.

So, now there are no inky-fingered print students to jeer at in the canteen, I wondered what the design students thought about printing; what did it mean to them? Whatever it is, it will be a huge loss to them–and us–if it’s not there. So, then I wondered what else LCC could do with that press to make it more valuable to keep?

Mother London had a very similar thought when they created the Cereal Poetry for Jordans / Penguin in the orginal pilot Matter edition in 2008. Their insight being that you'll always read whatever's on the back of a cereal packet while you're eating the cereal–so why not turn it into a literary moment?