After the early days in a basement room, Avantgarde became one of the largest large format digital printing companies in Germany. Thanks to PRESS MATCHER the same consistent color is now being maintained across all their systems together with substantial savings in ink costs.

The company was founded nine years ago by Wolfgang Böning, who originally started out as a decorator. Very early on, he realized the new creative possibilities for advertising design with the new large format printing systems then on offer. The real break-through for Avantgarde came with the installation of the first DURST RHO 600 UV flatbed printer, allowing printing directly on a wide range of rigid and flexible materials with white as a color or background and with inline varnishing to create higher color intensity or special gloss effects. Today, in addition to the Durst, two OCÉ Arizona 250 + 350 GT UV printers, a VUTEK QS 2000 UV printing system and a MIMAKI JV5 solvent printer form the complete printing line. For creating packaging dummies or special shapes a large format VHF CNC-rotary cutter and a ZÜND plotter are used. The building, which looks rather unspectacular from the outside, also houses a large material storage area. All standard materials like Forex rigid foam boards or Alu Dibond composite panels are kept in large supply to be able to produce time-critical ‚rush jobs‘ without delay, a situation that happens quite often. Overnight and weekend production is nothing unusual for Avantgarde.

For quite some time now, word on the company’s quality and capability has spread far beyond the greater Essen and Ruhr area despite the fact that they do not advertise and that their homepage does not even give information on their entire service offering. Among their customers are classical exhibition stand builders and retail store fitters, and of course design agencies, which regularly place orders for brands like Red Bull or Sony and Karstadt department stores.

ALWAYS A STEP AHEAD

In addition to these products, every now and then there are jobs which are a creative challenge for Wolfgang Bönings team. For an artist from Ruegen island, impressive large format reproductions of her artwork are being regularly produced as are steles made out of safety glass, weighing several tons and imprinted for an art museum. The variety of machines and the solid know-how of the employees enable complicated dummy packages or complex models to be completed. Just recently, a live-sized model of the Google street-view camera was built for an exhibition.

„Not for nothing I have named the company ‚Avantgarde‘.” Explains Böning, We invest a lot, not only in the latest technology, but also in the training and know-how of our employees in order to always be a step ahead. Contrary to classic printing methods like offset, which now follow industry standards, digital wide format printing does not know any standards or any standard operating procedures. So we just went ahead and defined our own standards and internal processes over the years. Today we can guarantee a secure and effective production in spite of the variety and complexity of the business.”

Head of the entire technical operation is Achim von Armeln, who, before he joined Avantgarde, worked for Durst for several years. It was he who introduced ORIS Press Matcher to the company: „At a prepress partner company I saw the CGS solution used there for proofing and digital printing,” he adds. Our customers increasingly expect us, as a wide format printing company, to adhere to the standards used in offset printing. More and more we get ISOcoated V2 proofs, which we also have to match in UV printing. It’s not surprising, therefore, that our customers have much higher demands of brand identity than they had only a short while ago.

Consistent color across entire brand communication is essential today. We installed a trial version of ORIS Press Matcher Pro and immediately noticed a significant increase in quality. However, this alone did not justify the investment since, in addition to the software, we needed to purchase a suitable spectrophotometer and a powerful computer. Our main objective was to create a more reliable and secure production process. Thanks to PRESS MATCHER, we can now produce a defined quality at the touch of a button by reducing the costs of unnecessary test prints or material waste.

Naturally, we are using a multitude of rigid and flexible substrates. Nevertheless we can now achieve the same color reproduction on almost all printer/substrate combinations. To a large extent we can keep our wide format printers within the tolerances meant for proofing systems. We now have created ORIS profiles for all standard materials and set-up workflows accordingly to automate the entire production. As almost all files are being centrally processed in ORIS Press Matcher, and some of the files are quite large, we have recently invested in a high-performance Quad-Core PC.“