Details/Credits

Roland DGA was used as creative agency through several product launches, the biggest of these launches was going to be their first foray into latex printing. We produced all marketing materials for worldwide business units and dealer channels working closely with Product Management and Japan development for quality control and research.

Marketing materials featured applied demo graphic files highlighting profitable applications, such as backlit billboards, posters, wall graphics, decals, and vehicle wraps. During live demonstrations, dealers would have the AP print out those same demo graphics they’ve been seeing online, cementing this link between what the machine could do and what we showed.

Company: Roland DG Corp. Japan
Creative Direction: Ed Navarro
Copywriting: Ben Fellowes
Art Direction | Graphic Design: Julian Arellano

Concepts and Direction

Concept and imagery direction was pulled from combination of water and nature to represent to aqueous latex inks and it’s environmentally friendly approach to printing. We stood away from the typical greens used in similar environmentally-friendly products and wanted to elicit life through what our experiences with what we valued in our connection to the outside world.

Our first passes of the demo and hero imagery, played with the idea of water, life, and the sky at different time of days with concept for hero imagery to be shown on all marketing materials playing with the idea of water and liquid, and incorporating ideas of concern among Japan, like using greens more, as well as abstracting the idea of life, pigment, and light as a particle and wave. A bit of each of these ideas nested their way into the final product and the exploration allowed us to really push the boundaries of what print was.

Final Concepts and Deliverables

The final images ultimately pulled from a combination of our concepts while maintaining initial direction. Our interpretation of this idea was that the AP-640 represented the pure physics of light and the chemistry of pigment and water pulled the viewer in using printing as a gateway to perceiving the natural world. Decoration for the images were inspired more so by science textbooks at this time and imagery was chose for it’s form and detail.

If you notice, the demo images focus on Cyans, Magentas, Yellows, and Blacks (the typical CMYK ink setup for most printers) with Greens, Oranges, and Reds being secondary in prominence, these make up the typical family of colors that most printers try to hit with clients. These were used to actually test the machine concurrently with our marketing concepts, in fact all of the images being shown on the printer were shared with end users and dealers to test out the AP at 52 inches and 300 DPI. We tweaked the final demo images to show off the AP-640 in the best light.