Although I've been a member of PrintPlanet since it began (1996 if memory serves) I've never introduced myself. So, to correct that oversight here goes (sorry for being long-winded but I'm an old fart LOL).
My print career began in the 1960s with my Mum bringing home naughty photos from the printshop where she worked as bindery foreman. My job was to hide the naughty bits by painting over the photos which then would be reproduced. She also brought home "job work" (e.g. manually numbering invoices and collating multi-page documents). A great way to enhance my allowance. During the summer I worked in the small print shop as an odd-job man, coating plates, stripping film, burning the plates etc).
Fast forward, got my Fine Arts Masters degree and taught illustration, photography and graphic design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts school of Art and Design. At the time I also did freelance editorial photography and illustration for ad agencies and magazines (e.g. Reader's Digest, Montreal Scene, Chatelaine, McDonalds etc) This was the late 60s and early 70s. It was also when I started to experiment with analog FM screening.
The Québec Separatist movement killed the school and my interest in staying in Montréal so in 1976 we upped sticks and moved to Calgary where I worked for a prepress shop doing all the photography for the Bay's newspaper ads as well as shooting the film for the newspaper printing presses.
Yikes it was cold, so upped sticks again and off to Vancouver where I got a job as art and studio director at Maccan Erickson advertising. I launched IKEA in Canada, did ads for Honda and eventually stress burned out.
Then in 1982 I worked as in-house Creative Director at Price Printing. I established the company as an award-winning key marketing services provider for businesses where a traditional advertising/design firm's services were not an appropriate fit. I managed a staff of two other graphic designers and was responsible for account support, design creative, art and photography as well as presswork quality control. I learned a lot from the prepress and press folks. The unique combination of value-added creative services and quality presswork made Price Printing a competitive powerhouse and as a result, the subject of a buy-out and consolidation by Quebecor World.
Poof!
Then I partnered as Technical Director/Marketing to take a small 5 person copy/print company to "the next level." Under my prepress technical guidance the company grew from 5 people to a staff of 30 and became the largest PostScript-based service bureau in western Canada. The company set the benchmark for quality desktop publishing output and serviced such companies as VanCity Savings, Richmond Savings, BC Tel, Rodgers Communications, and most of the top advertising agencies in Vancouver. In 1995 I told them the business might last another year but that this new thing called CtP would kill the business unless they changed their business model. They disagreed and sent me packing. They lasted another 14 months before going out of business.
I was immediately hired on a one year contract to assist Hemlock Printers (western Canada's largest commercial sheetfed print shop) to transition from a proprietary Scitex prepress and film-based production workflow to an open platform PostScript and Computer-to-Plate workflow. During my tenure I also stood in for a portion of my time as acting Manufacturing Manager.
That's when I joined the PrintPlanet forums and discovered Creo (and they discovered me).
In 1997 Creo hired me as the Print Quality Technical Marketing Manager to help printers understand the new technology and leverage its potential. I also helped the engineers understand what printers needed. I worked directly with Creo's product, management, and engineering teams to develop knowledge, technology, tools and processes to help enable Creo to grow from a small, single product, company to the leading developer and vendor of graphic communication industry technologies and systems. I was on the development team for products such as Staccato, Maxtone, CX and Fusion screening, Prinergy, and Colorflow. For eleven years at Creo/Kodak. Presented at print technical conferences, trained printers and buyers regarding print quality issues in Europe, N. America, and S.E. Asia. Articles published in trade journals, co-authored TAGA paper on halftone screening, authored BRIDG's guide to halftone screening.
I was in heaven.
I founded the go-to-market initiative - "Value In Print" that generated over $20 million in annual business, validated premium pricing and allowed for greater profit margins on sales of Creo's CtP devices. The ViP initiative played a crucial role in making the Creo brand the high quality benchmark in the printing industry.
But Kodak bought Creo in 2005 - it was a difficult time for me (and many others). Thankfully Kodak transferred the engineering functions of the teams that I worked with to Shanghai and as a result I was vaporized into retirement in 2008.
But I still stay in touch with the industry through things like the RE
rint cartoons, posting on this forum, and the occasional consulting job (just finished converting our local newspaper the Victoria Times Colonist to FM screening).
That's about it.
