Having Fun with Digital Transparency
Digital Space is all about sharing best practices, musings and inspirations with fellow digital print enthusiasts. So when Minneapolis-based Larsen Design won the Minnesota AIGA’s Creative Block Award for the year’s best promotional piece for the design of the “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) print promotion for Wausau Paper, I wanted to share the details on what exactly made this piece a winner.
I sat down with Michelle Solie, senior designer for Larsen, to discuss her inspiration behind WYSIWYG, and I walked away with some great digital print insights…
Wausau Paper’s intent behind the promotion was to show that our Royal product line has many digitally compatible papers. I asked Michelle about her overall inspiration on the WYSIWYG project, and how she approached the design. She explained that the piece was created to give unique examples of digital printing to inspire and explain the different types of materials and machines used for digitally produced projects.
The piece’s overall concept was transparency because the digital print process is very straightforward – there are no complicated print techniques, a digital proof is the same as the final output so you know exactly what you are going to get and can make changes easily. For Michelle, transparency conveyed simplicity and flexibility, without being boring, as in the example of the electric green Jell-O shaped into a Bundt mold.
In addition to the creative photography her team used to convey transparency, Michelle attributes Larsen’s recent recognition to the unique structure of the piece, which incorporated a single-ring binding and an eye-catching folder. She also felt the WYSIWYG piece was particularly relevant to the design community because digital is the “big thing” right now. The piece shares useful and straightforward information about digital design and printing, but in a playful manner; by including color, texture and new techniques, which oftentimes are overlooked during the digital design process.
“We wanted to convey that you can do digital in a fun way, which absolutely means incorporating colored and textured paper into digital projects,” Michelle said.
“One interesting thing about digital printing is that on an uncoated sheet you can achieve varying levels of sheen reflective of the ink coverage, creating a varnish effect that really pops off the page,” she continued. “There are also digital textured varnishes available that I learned about while working on this project.”
According to Michelle, digital is filling a niche; it provides good quality and flexibility and there are many different and fun things you can do with it. What will you try next?