St Bernard Pass - The Italian Job

Had the pleasure of driving to Italy this year and instead of taking our normal route through the St Bernard tunnel we decided to go over the top of the mountain. This only takes about 20 minutes longer but the views are amazing and when you reach the top you can stop and visit where the St Bernard mountain rescue dogs are kept. This is on the border of Italy and Switzerland you can also visit a small museum and take great photos of the lake and mountains at the top. I normally find this is the best tunnel into Italy as it is less congested and hardly ever any traffic jams which can often occur at the Frejus and Mont Blanc tunnels. So if you get the chance definitely pay a visit you can watch the road snaking up ahead of you as you drive. Some of the scenes for the original Italian Job were filmed here. Anyway the holidays finished so back to the world of print!

FESPA 2013 at Excel Centre

 

I attended FESPA last week at the Excel Centre to see the latest technologies emerging in the print industry. The event was well attended with plenty of equipment to see. One thing that caught the eye was the vehicle wrapping as this photo of a mini wrapped in velvet shows.

Rivington Street Festival Shoreditch

The Rivington Street Festival in Shoreditch took place last week and it appeared that a good day was had by all. This is the 2nd year of the festival so it will hopefully be an annual event from now on. Kopykat's yard was used for a bar area with a DJ. A large bottle of Desperado beer also found its way into the yard.

Kopykat joins Two Sides

Kopykat has joined Two Sides which is an organisation set up to counteract some of the myths surrounding the print and paper industry from an environmental point of view. Its membership spans the whole graphic communications value chain. Two Sides seeks to ensure that, by fostering a better understanding of our industry's environmental credentials, Print and Paper through its myriad of uses from commercial applications to the basis of learning and creativity, remains the essential communication medium of choice. Browse the website www.twosides.info you will be surprised at some of the things you find out.

3D Printing

Fears grow as the first gun is produced using a 3D printer http://bit.ly/10pKZ8q. Amazing what you can produce on 3D printers but this could be one of the downsides.

Printed Aprons - Google

Google asked us to print a small amount of aprons for a cookery event that they are involved with in Israel. It meant printing a logo and sourcing the aprons we then added the logo to the apron by dye sublimination process.

Fish Central EC1

A quick blog away from printing just to sing the praises of a local restaurant called Fish Central in Central Street EC1 about 10 minutes from Kopykat. We visited on Saturday evening the service was really good, the staff exceptionally friendly and the fish excellent. So highly recommended if you want to pay a visit.

Birthday Posters

Ever thought of a poster as a birthday present? We can scan your photos creating a collage effect then print to either A2, A1 or even A0 and mount onto polyboard for you to display at a friends birthday bash. We have done this recently for a couple of clients and it has gone down well at the party. Of course you could do this for lots of other events as well maybe the best man at a wedding could get some embarrassing photos of the groom!

Digital Booklets

It has been a busy weekend at Kopykat we had shifts on until 11pm both Friday and Saturday evenings in order to print a large digital booklet job that is wanted for a meeting 11am on Monday the order was placed Friday at 4pm. If all goes well we should finish the job for 10pm tonight Sunday then we can look forward to a relaxing restful week ahead. He says with tongue firmly in cheek!

B2 Printing London

Looking for a B2 printer in London? look no further we have both B2 presses and B3. B2 is suitable for multi-page booklets and brochures as well as general marketing collateral such as leaflets, newsletters and postcards. You will also find that longer run lengths tend to be printed B2 for example 40k letterheads would almost certainly be a B2 job. Smaller run work under 5k would more likely be printed on a B3 press which is half the size of B2. You do not as a client have to make this decision the printer will use his experience to select the most suitable machine at the most competitive rate for you.

Bocelli - Love in Portofino

We have recently been asked to produce a series of quad size posters to promote Bocelli's new film Love in Portofino. We produced the posters on a backlit material as they needed to be placed in lightboxes. We then supplied postal tubes inserted the posters and distributed to 230 cinemas nationwide.

FSC Chain of Custody

Just been told that we have passed our annual FSC chain of custody audit. This is great news as it allows us to print the FSC logo on a clients print job should they want us to assuming of course the paper comes from an FSC source. Chain of custody shows the journey of the raw material from a well managed sustainable forest to the paper mill, the printer and eventually the end user. FSC was originally set up by the furniture industry to stop illegal logging.

Two Sides challenges Google and others.

Two Sides the group set up to challenge false claims about paper has challenged Google with an open letter. You can read about it here. http://goo.gl/5d2kd

Mobile Usage

We printed a leaflet for Google just before Christmas which gave some interesting facts about mobiles and internet usage. It took 360 days for the iPod to sell 1 million units, 74 days in 2007 for the iPhone to sell the same, in 2008 the iPad took 28 days and last year in 2012 the iPhone 5 took half a day. Draw something received 10 million users in 10 days it took AOL 9 years to do that.

Mobile usage will continue to grow in the G20 countries it is predicted that internet connections will double between 2010 and 2015 and 80% of these new connections will be mobile. On Christmas Day 2011 7 million smartphones activated and 240 million apps downloaded.