Publish, powered by Blurb: Bound Printing from the Comfort of your Desktop

Collateral created using Publish

Competition is fierce these days, and marketing presentations, brochures, portfolios and manuals must far exceed expectations in order to fully capture the attention of your audience. Consolidated Graphics has partnered with Blurb to bring you the perfect solution: Publish, powered by Blurb. This on-demand publishing platform provides a free Adobe® InDesign® plug-in, enabling you to use your preferred design tool to create professionally-bound print collateral in quantities as few as one or as many as you need.

Here’s a Q&A with James Hill, president of Nies/Artcraft, a Consolidated Graphics company in St. Louis, who worked with Blurb to develop Publish.

CGX: What is Publish?
Hill: At its core, Publish is an on-demand, online platform that enables companies to print customized, bound print materials in low quantities, with a high quality output. Through Publish, our customers can design the materials they need, interact with Blurb’s online interface, and tap into Consolidated Graphics’ production and fulfillment platform to generate professionally bound print products, all from the comfort of their desks.

CGX: How did Publish come about?
Hill: Publish was actually a result of emerge™ 2011. (Note to readers: emerge is Consolidated Graphics’ annual marketing and printing solutions conference.) When Eileen Gittens (CEO of Blurb) spoke about Blurb during her keynote, we had so many customers asking how they could utilize this technology for their business needs. We listened to their requests and partnered up with Blurb to provide them with on-demand publishing needs.

CGX: How do you see this technology being used?
Hill: The possibilities really are endless, and it will be up to our customers to determine the true potential of this platform. We anticipate it being used for things like high-end catalogs, product manuals, important presentations, informational leave-behinds, and more. But what makes Publish so powerful is the flexibility that it places in the hands of our customers.

CGX: What design flexibility does Publish provide?
Hill: Publish delivers the functionality of Blurb within the creative framework of InDesign, offering a tremendous amount of flexibility and support for designers. The bound books are available in eight sizes, five paper substrates, and four bindery/cover choices. Publish even offers a variety of print-ready templates for all formats and page counts, as well as easy pre-flight and file transfer for proofing. That’s backed by Blurb customer service. We plan to listen to our customers to gradually introduce even more capabilities over time.

To see Publish in action – and to download the free plug-in, visit www.cgx.com/publish today! For more information, contact the Publish team at publish@nies.com.