By Craig Lewis, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
Creative people have known it for a long time, but recent reports and government initiatives have confirmed it – the design industry is one of the major drivers of the European economy.
Eurostat figures state that cultural and creative industries (CCIs), comprising of a wide variety of sub-sectors from architecture, libraries and museums to design, books and publishing, employ 8.7 million people in the EU. That is equivalent to 3.8% of the total workforce in the EU and represents 1.2 million enterprises.
CCIs are also fast growing. The Rebuilding Europe: the cultural and creative economy before and after COVID-19 study by global consultancy EY, reported a year on year growth in the sector of 2.6% since 2013. That is above the EU average of 2%.
The important role CCIs play in the economy is one of the reasons the British government announced £77m of new funding plans to grow the sector by £50bn and support a million more jobs by 2030. Another reason is that employment in these industries has grown at five times the rate of the rest of the British economy since 2011.
This growth coincides with a skills shortage in graphic arts which is creating an emerging need for designers who can multitask, handling not just design but also prepress, customer support, and web to print.
These competent generalists often customise e-commerce platforms, produce designs for large format, direct to garment and production printing. They can also oversee preflight checks and file adjustments, ensuring brand uniformity, streamlined production, and smooth execution.
The trend of creative staff moving from specialists to generalists is expected to increase as enterprise print rooms and Print Service Providers alike seek to create a comprehensive approach that supports the ability to deliver a more diverse range of services.
Helping creative generalists with their varied workload and supporting hyper efficiency are intelligent and responsive software solutions. Among Ricoh’s suite of options is FusionPro®, a high performance data driven document creation tool that allows creatives to build rules based intelligent templates which, on receipt of data, will compose print ready files on the fly. The intelligence within the templating tool ensures brand guidelines are met and protects the integrity of the finished piece and built in production settings means imposed output files can be created during the document composition process with all the necessary printer marks in place ready for print, reducing time and resource greedy pre-press activities.
Suitable for a wide range of output, from customer communications, statements, and annual reports to marketing materials, signs, posters and more. Whatever is being designed and printed, templates can be created. Designed once and used multiple times with changes to content driven by data rather than the need for creatives to go back to the drawing board.
And for busy creatives handling clients’ ad hoc requests for changes to designs, templates can be added to an online portal allowing clients to modify already approved printed materials themselves.
Add to this automated production workflows, letting technology handle essential activities from design to print rather than hard to find resources. The results can be substantial. Increasing throughput, reducing turnaround time, resource time and costs.
With FusionPro, and other Ricoh technologies, you can enable creativity with specialists or generalists. As a result, your operation can increase its adaptability when meeting changing market needs.
www.ricoh-europe.com
