Gershon Alon, manager, HP Indigo Workflow Solutions, says we spend a lot of time thinking about a book’s cover – the design, the substrate, the binding process – but we often fail to think of the entire book as our canvas, leveraging designs and decorations not just on the cover but also the edges of the pages themselves. Images that are visible when the book is closed or only visible when the book’s pages are fanned.
The earliest fore-edge paintings, which were symbolic designs, date possibly as far back as the 10th century. Books were hand written manuscripts, illustrated by artists. And like any artistic work, the decorations expanded to the edges of the book, resulting in personalised, high value works of art. In other worlds, creating personalised books was in fact the only way to create a book…
Today, luckily, there are faster ways to create edge printing. HP Indigo users can now leverage the new Edge Printing feature in HP Smart Stream Designer for Adobe InDesign version 11 to create images – names, pictures, decorations, or personalised, on the edges of the book.
With the ‘spine’ option inside the Edge Printing feature, a design can be carried across several books. Creating a sequence in which portions of one image come together can turn a series of books into a unique, high value collection.