Well isn’t Barcelona a cool place? I arrived on Wednesday and was picked up from the airport and taken to my hotel. After checking in and going up to my room on the twelfth floor, I looked out of the window at the view over Barcelona and in the distance could see the very famous Temple of the Sagrada Familia by Gaudi. Cool! With the rest of the afternoon to myself I was going to head out and do the tourist thing.

Now, in my head I looked at the distance out the window and thought to myself I should be able to walk there in about twenty minutes. How wrong was I?! About two hours later, £60 less well off and with very sore feet I managed to find it. No I hadn’t been pickpocketed, nor had I taken a taxi, halfway there I had simply loaded up Google Maps on my iphone to help me find my route. Now I knew that data was expensive while roaming abroad and so I reset the usage thingymajig to track how much data I was using so I could keep my usage under control. After 5-10 minutes of using it I checked back on my data safe in the knowledge I now knew my route thinking I would probably have used about 1mb by now. Oh god. I thought at first my eyes were deceiving me. 18mbs in under 10 minutes! At £3 per mb I would have nearly been cheaper taking a limousine or a helicopter there! Oh well, I had found it at last and spent the next half an hour or so snapping away with my DSLR.

Well, as I mentioned last week, I had been invited to Barcelona by Hewlett Packard for a press launch for the release of some new workgroup printers, software solutions and media choices that are designed to help design firms to drive new business opportunities. And so on Thursday they took us along to the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and on Friday a visit to their rather impressive head office. Now most of what HP had to say was mainly aimed at the CAD/Architecture industry, but there was a lot of cross-over for me in the graphic design for print industry. With the current financial climate, agencies are having to do more and more to win pitches for jobs and impress clients. It seems that most jobs are now on tenders or are competitions with clients looking to see as many ideas as possible before making decisions and spending money. Now more than ever you have to impress and wow clients at pitch level.

HP wanted to get that across with their new large format printers – HP Designjet T1200, HP Designjet T770 and HP Designjet T620 – that so much more can be accomplished for pitches than just mounting your designs onto foam core boards, even when time is short and money is tight. For example, at the press launch they had giant lampshades hanging from the ceiling with large format prints wrapped around them and backlit – very simple to make but very different for a pitch and memorable for a client. These looked great and you found yourself turning them in your hand and interacting with designs in a much more creative way. They also had really nice architectural drawings printed on fabric that spanned about ten metres across a wall. Again, very easy to do but much more dynamic for a pitch, I could see this being used to walk a client along the wall showing the progress of their brand development. These kind of products can help give the client an experience when viewing your work or pitch, help you to stand out from the thousands of other agencies and without breaking the bank.

One thing that stuck in my mind in one of the presentations is that we often hear people in the media saying that since the launch of web, print is dead or dying. HP made a point of saying that print is very much alive and all the new technology they release is bringing new and exciting things to us in-house that before would have to be outsourced.

Another cool thing worth a mention is that they have been developing, along with their printers, the HP Instant Printing Utility v3 which will be available on 1st November 2009. Now there is nothing worse than setting up a printer with super expensive, lovely, fancy photo paper and then printing your work only to realise that it has printed really, really tiny in the middle of the page or really giant and cropped half your image out. Their new software stops all this giving you an in-depth preview of exactly how your final print will sit on the paper before printing it and supports more file formats making it easier for you to print different type of files without launching the different software applications—straight from your desktop, all with just your right click button. This can be great in an office where administration staff don’t always have all the software packages on their computers. With the instant printing utility they can print your documents even though they don’t have the artwork software thus letting the creatives be creative. You can download and find out more about this great new HP software here www.hp.com/go/HPInstantprintingutility

Be creative,

Andrew