When In-plant Graphics decided to change its name to In-plant Impressions in the winter of 2019 it was not a first for the magazine. Nor a second or third. In-plant Impressions has, after all, been around for more than 65 years. (Click here for our complete history.)
In those six-plus decades, the magazine has gone through numerous name changes, from its debut as Offset Duplicator Review to the clunky Reproductions Review and Methods and on to its current moniker, In-plant Impressions.
Let us take you back the beginning, January 1951, when a man named Richard F. Caruzzi published a little 30-page digest called Offset 
Duplicator Review out of his office in New York. It featured stories on halftones, inks and the evils of having too much paper to deal with in the office. (Sound familiar?)
The magazine carried that moniker for almost nine years until, in October 1959, it was changed to Reproductions Review to acknowledge “the progressively greater breadth of services now offered by in-plant reproduction departments.” Technology was advancing. (Originality was not.)
The next big change came in January 1966 when the book grew to standard magazine size. In September 1971, after a merger with Reproductions Methods, the name was again altered. The rather uninspired result was REPRODUCTIONS Review and Methods. Blah!
Perhaps sensing the wordiness of this title, Editor William B. Leonard Jr. shrunk the size of the last three words in May 1977 so you could barely see them on the cover and simply referred to the book as Reproductions in his editorials.
In January 1979 Editor Robert Rapp tried an experiment and rechristened the magazine Reproductions ’79. (He also went for the quick and dirty method of
getting readers to pay attention by putting pretty girls on the cover for no apparent reason.)
When December rolled around, though, it apparently dawned on his successor Tom Bluesteen that he couldn’t keep using that name in the ’80s, so he did a little thinking and came up 
with IN-PLANT Reproductions.
About a year later, though, some time in the spring of 1981, Bluesteen apparently forgot some of the basic rules of capitalization (e.e. cummings aside) and started spelling the 
magazine’s name IN-PLANT reproductions (with a small “r”, for those of you who didn’t catch it).
There were variations after that; for several years in the mid-’80s the thing was called In-plant Reproductions & Electronic Publishing, a title almost as long as the magazine itself.
In January 1996, 
Editor Bob Neubauer and former Publisher Jeff OKon held some deep discussions to come up with a new name. In the process they considered a number of ideas, such as Inside Graphics, In-House Imaging, Repro, and Image. But in the end, In-plant Graphics won out.
For 23 years, the IPG name dominated the in-plant industry. During that time, its only competitor went out of business. In 2018, IPG‘s owner NAPCO Media proposed a name change to In-plant Impressions, to better align the magazine with its other graphic arts publications, Printing Impressions and Wide-format Impressions. So in January 2019, it was rebranded In-plant Impressions.
For a much more complete history of IPI, please read the article celebrating our 50th anniversary.
