Shine On
Global Cosmetic Industry enlists its "makeup artist" to apply metallic highlights.
Cosmetic companies are well-known shine fighters, mobilizing generation after generation of face-conscious consumers with their "Powder to the People" battle cry.
Yet the industry also endorses a little strategically placed shine, from lip gloss to body glitter, as a means to accentuate the positive.
No wonder, then, that Global Cosmetic Industry (GCI), a monthly trade magazine published by Cleveland-based Advanstar Com-munications, dazzled readers last year by printing one of its covers on holographic metallized paper.
Typically, the publication's cover features a standard four-color photo—
usually a product shot, reports Laura Watilo Blake, GCI's senior graphic designer. Still, when opportunity knocked, the magazine was willing to try out a new look for an issue.
In this case, GCI opened its doors to Unifoil, a Passaic Park, NJ-based laminating, coating and metallizing specialist, and to Crown Roll Leaf, a manufacturer of hot stamping foils and holograms in Paterson, NJ. The companies had a prior relationship: GCI covers cosmetic packaging, which is a target market for both Unifoil and Crown Roll Leaf, explains Keith Hammer-beck, director of manufacturing services for the publication.
Hammerbeck and then-Editor Nancy Jeffries decided to develop a cover using Unifoil's UniLustre metallic paper, incorporating Pixel-Grafx holography from Crown Roll Leaf. They entrusted the project to Watilo Blake, who had just been hired to art direct GCI and another Advanstar title.
Simplicity by design
The trick for Watilo Blake was to create a design that would work well with the substrate. "We knew that there would be a little variation [in the positioning of the metallized paper] on the press, so we had to come up with a really simple design to pull it off," she recalls.
Working on an old SuperMac 700 (soon to be upgraded to a G4), Watilo Blake mocked up several different preliminary designs, taking into consideration a number of factors.
