By Erin La Row, editor, PostPress
Fall is here and that means the start of football season – a busy time for the team at Consolidated Printing, Inc., a division of FineLine Technologies, located in Van Buren, Arkansas.
Consolidated Printing, also referred to as CPI, is a full-service commercial printer specializing in producing event tickets. The company has served organizations and events from nearly every field of the sports and entertainment industries. From souvenir tickets to parking passes, no project is too big or too complex for CPI. The CPI team prides itself on ensuring projects have that “wow” factor clients and sports fans love.
CPI was tasked with producing the Las Vegas Raiders’ 2022 season ticket books. The Raiders used the ticket books to honor past Hall of Fame players by incorporating their pictures into the design of each game ticket, along with an array of special embellishments. After each game, the tickets could be removed to create a commemorative player card. The result was a striking ticket book that wowed the judges of the 2023 FSEA Gold Leaf Awards. CPI’s ticket book project received Gold for Best Use of Digital Foil (Varnish Adhesive).
All of the art was created in Photoshop and the project was built in InDesign, using multiple layers for the foil and spot coating on each ticket. The entire project was printed digitally on a Xerox® iGen and a Xerox® Iridesse® Production Press. The board stock was a X16-point Candesce C1S. Each book included 15 different ticket types with 13 unique game art types with each ticket and book personalized.
Each game ticket included unique raised digital spot coating and raised digital foil that was accomplished on a Scodix Ulta 2 press. The names of the Hall of Fame players and the year they were inducted were reversed out of a raised silver metallic foil with a spot textured coating over the illustration of the player in uniform.
The front covers for the ticket books were foil stamped on a Gietz foil stamping press using a textured foil stamping die for the background of the cover with reversed-out areas of flat foil stamping in the Raiders logo and the words “2022 Season.” A bright silver foil from Kurz Transfer Products was used. A second pass embossed the Raiders logo in perfect register. The engravings for the job were supplied by Owosso Graphic Arts, Inc. and Universal Engraving, Inc.
“The intricate part is that each page had variable foil and polymer, some 65,000 variable pages – along with 800,000 RFID (radio-frequency identification) inlays applied and encoded uniquely,” said Curtis Howells, vice president – general manager of Consolidated Printing.
The RFID allowed for expedited stadium entrance, along with the ability for greater customer engagement. RFID tags were applied and encoded on a customized press made specifically for CPI.
One of the challenges of the project was simply the nature of the product. Howells said each individual ticket had to be accounted for. “If one ticket gets destroyed, it has to be remade,” he added. “With all of the steps involved, there are many patches, as we call them.”
Howells said the client loved the final product. “It was a great plan that worked to perfection,” he added.
