If your company provides luxury private jet travel, “good” is never good enough. So when Flexjet wanted to create a high-end invitation for a Fifth Avenue fashion show featuring stylish fabric swatches, Manhattan’s Highresolution printed a piece tailor made for those who appreciate the finer things in life.
The event, designed to highlight Flexjet’s partnership with Italian menswear brand ISAIA, was meant to be a celebration of style and craftsmanship, qualities that they wanted to convey in their invitation.
Working closely with Flexjet’s own in-house designers, Highresolution crafted an eyelet-bound booklet that brought to mind the swatchbooks of a fine clothier.
The cover – actually two Colorplan Claret 130 lb. Cover sheets duplex laminated together – features the logos for both Flexjet and ISAIA hot stamped in Black foil. Opening the cover reveals a minimalist map of New York City on the inside cover flap, also rendered in Black foil (though with a deeper impression for greater tactile impact), complete with a star indicating the location of the event.
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The 5 pages inside are 65 lb. Domtar Cougar Natural which have been French folded, laminated and scored, creating a cascading, stepped-out effect. Perforation on the actual invitation page allowed the recipient to tear it out and present it at the door while leaving the rest of the suite intact.
One of the fun parts about this piece is that everything is rendered in Black foil with Red foil accents – neither pages nor cover were actually printed. I say ONE of the fun parts because we haven’t yet gotten to the icing on the cake: the fabric swatches!
Where many printers would have tried to sell the client on simply printing swatch patterns on a 100% cotton paper that feels somewhat like fabric, Highresolution knew that this wouldn’t fly with a company that prides itself on catering to a sophisticated clientele. (Frankly I don’t think Highresolution Founder and CEO David Drucker is capable of cutting corners, anyway.) Instead, they dye-sub printed the patterns on fabric 4-up per sheet and then laser cut it, inserting the individual swatches into the pages before lamination.
Even the scoring here is perfectly executed. Each score is moved a little further down from the last so that the individual pages can be easily lifted and read.
The finished piece not only served as an elegant memento of a special event for attendees, but also a reminder to us all that thinking outside the box is always in fashion with clients who know quality when they see it.
Sabine Lenz is the founder of PaperSpecs.com, the first online paper database and community specifically designed for paper specifiers.
Growing up in Germany, Sabine started her design career in Frankfurt, before moving to Australia and then the United States. She has worked on design projects ranging from corporate identities to major road shows and product launches. From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, her list of clients included Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Deutsche Bank, IBM and KPMG.
Seeing designers struggle worldwide to stay current with new papers and paper trends inspired Sabine to create PaperSpecs, an independent and comprehensive Web-based paper database and weekly e-newsletter. She is also a speaker on paper issues and the paper industry. Some refer to her lovingly as the "paper queen" who combines her passion for this wonderful substrate called paper with a hands-on approach to sharing her knowledge.