Many people love what they do. I would like to talk about the passion for graphic arts. The persons who have worked for many years in the printing industry, the persons who had professional achievements in graphic arts certainly became fascinated by this field.
You can feel how passion envelops you when you start liking it: the smell of printing ink, the smell of glue in the folding box gluing machine, the sound of cylinders of printing presses, the sound of die-cutters.
You see an offer for a sheetfed printing machine and you remember how printers beat the sheets to prepare them for printing, how they adjust the inking with the help of ink level control devices for ink units, how they check the colour density of the raster.
When graphic arts are your life, you can read one of the many online books thinking how it would look like if it were a printed book. The cover would be laminated, bright or matt, or it could be UV varnished. You would feel the smell of the heated adhesive of the book back gluing and back lining machines, you would see how the folding machine brings the large printing sheets to the small book format, you would feel the smell of fresh print when you browse through a book that has just been taken out of the production line.
You go to the supermarket and while you put the products in the shopping basket you lean to read the label of the jam jar. You look carefully to see if it is printed only with process colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black and you wonder whether it is varnished or not. Is it flexographic or offset printing? How many colour groups had the printing machine? Was the ink ecologic or not?
In the morning, you buy a newspaper to read. You are immersed in the titles of articles, but after some pages, your fingers turn black. You are fascinated by the smell of fresh print, but some questions spin in your head. What type of ink did the persons who printed the newspaper use? Was the web press of coldset or heatset type?
You receive the phone bill at home and you notice every time how exquisitely is the logo of the phone company printed. How beautiful the printing is! What is the contribution of the printer and of the machine for printing envelopes? The label is printed so beautifully so that you get easier over the value of the invoice in the envelope even if it is quite high.
When you buy a pack of medicines from the drugstore you can notice the metallic foil applied on the box and you remember the equipment that did it, you can hear the noise made by the die-cutting equipment, you can see the boxes on the band in the gluing machine.
You receive a magazine advertising several products at promotional prices and you notice that the raster is a bit loaded and the pictures are not clear enough. You wonder if it is due to the pre-press when files were processed or something happened in the printing press.
All these mean passion, being committed to the printing field. You start liking the printing industry so much that you want to share the feeling with other people. How could you do this better than via the internet?
What if it is a virtual world, what if you see a picture or some details from a printing press? You can still feel the smell of ink.