Two in a Row for ConocoPhillips
FOR THE second year in a row, ConocoPhillips Creative Services has won Best of Show in the In-Print contest. This time, however, the honor carries much more meaning for the 18-employee, Bartlesville, Okla.-based in-plant.
“Last year’s project, it was all printed in-house, but the design was all handled by an outside agency,” notes Mike Cranor, senior printing specialist. The perfect binding was also done outside.
This year, though, the winning magazine was done completely in-house, from the writing, photography and design, to the prepress, printing and binding.
“So [being] able to bring it all in...that’s just real special to us,” says Cranor. “We can give the whole group a compliment.”
The in-plant printed 52,500 copies of the quarterly Spirit magazine, which is distributed to employees and dealers at the international energy company to let them know about ConocoPhillips’ activities. Because the 52-page magazine represents the company, quality is important, and all who work on it try to make it look the best it possibly can.
“It’s kind of made to be a coffee table piece,” remarks Cranor.
To ensure its quality, in-plant staff had to constantly check to make sure colors matched on the different signatures and that crossovers lined up. These details impressed the judges enough to pick the magazine above all other Gold Award winners to receive Best of Show honors.
Though it’s the second Best of Show for ConocoPhillips, the in-plant for Phillips Petroleum won the prize three times before its merger with Conoco. Some of the in-plant’s current staff worked on those pieces as well.
Teamwork Gets Rewarded
Spirit is edited by Ray Scippa. He and designers Danny Bishnow and Carmelo de Guzman work out of Conoco-Phillips’ Houston office. Once the magazine was laid out, they dropped the file into a shared folder, where it was retrieved by Frank Mitchell, prepress technician. He and Randy McDonald, prepress lead, did the imposition, output proofs and made plates on the shop’s Agfa :Palladio CTP device.
Plates were loaded onto the in-plant’s five-color Heidelberg Speedmaster 74 by operators Shayne Cros-thwait and Lee Tevebaugh. They printed eight-page signatures on NewPage Productolith paper. Text pages were aqueous coated. To make the color on the cover “jump off the page,” Cranor says, covers were sent outside for a UV coating (though he revealed that the in-plant is getting a UV coater in August).
Chad Duncan, production coordinator, did press checks and then oversaw the cutting, folding and binding. Jack Smith served as lead bindery operator for the job. He folded it on a Stahl folder, trimmed it with a Polar cutter and used a Muller Martini saddle stitcher to bind it. He and Duncan monitored the folds very carefully to make sure photo crossovers lined up perfectly.
The job took about eight days (13-14 hours a day) to print, Cranor says, plus an additional three or four days in the bindery.
Cranor says that Scippa, Spirit’s editor, had been striving to make ConocoPhillips’ magazine even better than publications from rival companies. This Best of Show honor is proof that he succeeded.
“Everybody’s really excited about it,” says Cranor.
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
