Established over thirty years ago, Metropress Ltd is a highly respected publishing division within dmg worldmedia, specialising in the fine arts and antiques markets. From its offices in the heart of London, it produces the Antiques Trade Gazette, renowned worldwide as the leading publication for the fine art and antiques trade. The ATG, distributed to 32 countries around the world, provides reliable and timely sources of information for those involved in the industry.
Over the last ten years Metropress has grown significantly and now designs, produces, publishes and prints a wide variety of antiques related publications. It offers a range of cost-effective services worldwide that enable companies within the fine art and antiques trade to promote their businesses not only in print, but also online.
Originally all production and pre-press functions were farmed out to third party suppliers. However with the development of the Macintosh it was decided to bring production in-house. This was implemented by Justin Massie-Taylor, Production Manager, and began with desktop Macs running OS 8 and utilising Quark and Photoshop applications and flat-bed Autokon mono scanners. With the further enhancements offered within Mac OS systems over the next few years, it became apparent that the introduction of colour to the workflow was now easily achievable. And therefore the Reprographics department installed the first of their three Scitex colour scanners.
With the release of the first Mac OS X servers some six years ago, it was decided to embrace the new UNIX technology to improve production efficiencies. HELIOS was one of the first companies to offer a prepress solution for Mac OS X Server with a range of application suites that would further enhance their workflow.
"We haven't looked back since," says Justin.
Since the original installation, Metropress has upgraded its systems and now runs two HELIOS servers utilising the latest generation of Xserve from Apple. These two HELIOS servers provide full OPI capabilities for both PC and Mac users, Print Serving (EtherShare/PCShare) throughout the network and PDF generation (Create PDF Server in association with Adobe Acrobat) for proofing and print.
Justin continues, "HELIOS delivers real benefits for users and the business as a whole. Antiques Trade Gazette is published weekly with an average pagination of 80 pages and incorporates some 1000 images per issue. Ninety per cent of the publication is generated in-house, incorporating reprographics, design and proofing - all to strict deadlines. This means we need speed, reliability and ease of use – HELIOS has helped us deliver all of these. We run a completely PDF based workflow and incorporate the use of OPI on the system to enable fast image import and printing. We have numerous print partners with whom we work, and with HELIOS I am able to assign colour profiles and Adobe Acrobat settings as specified by each print partner and name print queues accordingly. These queues are published on the network and all users can send print jobs in confident knowledge that the print and Acrobat settings are accurate."
"HELIOS EtherShare Admin enables easy administration and configuration of the system and negates the use of a dedicated IT resource. Each department is able to manage and configure its own part of the workflow and can flag potential errors with regards to damaged fonts and image resolution in PDF creation".
Apart from a small percentage of electronically supplied adverts, the Antiques Trade Gazette is produced in-house. The system is used to provide low-resolution PDFs for client approval and ultimately high-resolution PDF output for press. Six people now produce a publication that used to be created by ten - enabling a 40% increase in capacity.
“We produce a very glossy publication with lots of very high quality images...
This used to take one day to produce - it now takes twenty minutes.”
Metropress has grown to absorb that increased capacity and now produces a wide range of publications, catalogues, magazines and online products. As a result the number of operators has trebled. This number could have been significantly higher were it not for the improvements in technology and the use of HELIOS. Using a server-based product such as HELIOS has enabled scalability and uniformity across both platforms and users.
To illustrate one of the many benefits, Justin cites the following example: "One of the regular catalogues we produce for a high profile client requires perfection in terms of colour accuracy, image quality and adherence to deadlines. Where this publication used to take us one day to create the high-resolution PDFs, it now takes less than half an hour. This time saving has afforded us a useful buffer to further enhance our quality control and therefore customer service". Justin concludes: "We rely on the system to provide the speed, flexibility, reliability and ease of use that we require to deliver quality products in a competitive marketplace".
