Dave Holcombe of Emerald City Graphics /

Emerald City Graphics has sponsored AIGA Seattle in one form or another for the past 8 years, and has been a sustaining sponsor for the past 3 years. Besides designers and agencies, ECG’s clients range from large corporations to a one-woman cookie company.

LN: For those who haven’t yet used Emerald City Graphics’ services, what is your specialty or biggest strength?
DH: A huge selling point is that we can control your whole project from beginning to end: not only the printing but also the bindery and finishing. We have lots of crafts people in our organization who care and know the proper tools to get the right result.

LN: How long has ECG been around?
DH: Emerald City Graphics was founded in 1981, originally as a 2-color shop with a strength in bindery and finishing. We moved into 4-color printing in the early 1990s. A few years later Consolidated Graphics (of Houston, Texas) approached us with the idea that a pool of print manufacturing companies offering many different services would be stronger than an individual company. Consolidated bought both ECG and Heath Printers, and the two merged and relocated in Kent.

ECG’s strengths in bindery and finishing paired with the excellent printing and color of Heath made for a great combination that pushed the new partnership into a different market.

Today Emerald City Graphics is a home-town company with the scope of a national one.

LN: What are some of the new areas ECG is working in today?
DH: We’re doing more and more packaging. Our folding carton package division has become the fastest-growing segment of our business. Also, new technology in print is key to our growth as well. Online products like CGX Storefront and Cross Media campaigns (combining direct mail, email, and the web) are growing fast and point to the future of program printing.

LN: What’s the state of the printing side of the business these days?
DH: Straight printing is changing. It has to serve a purpose, not just have a graphic impact. Lots of materials we once printed for reps (brochures, data sheets, handouts) are now online instead. Print is still important, but the projects are smaller and more targeted. Because of the run lengths and the drive to variable (personalized) content for segmented audiences, digital printing is, of course, growing.

There’s also a move toward on-demand digital output. Nationally, Consolidated is the largest digital printer in America. (Editor’s note: Consolidated has 69 facilities in 27 states and Canada. It’s a publicly owned company, traded on the NYSE as CGX.) If a national client wants, it can print and have a piece in every major city in America tomorrow. For example, if a client is hosting an event at trade shows in multiple cities, rather than print all the run of a piece in Seattle and ship it around the country, the client can have each city’s run printed locally (at one of Consolidated’s regional facilities) within days of each event. Keeping print production closer to the point of distribution lowers costs and lessens the environmental impact of shipping cross country.

LN: Where does sustainability fit into Emerald City’s business?
DH: Sustainability is at the forefront of our process. We’re proud of it and tout it. All the Consolidated companies are Forest Stewardship Council certified. You can’t just use FSC paper and run the FSC logo. It’s a “chain of custody.”

Sustainability often costs more, but as there is more demand, the costs will come down. It’s what’s happening in best practice in the industry. (We also consider it a standard-of-living issue.)

Emerald City Graphics has a 96% recycling rate. There are ways to recycle paper without trying to make it bright white. Europe is ahead of us in that regard; they recycle paper into cardboard, insulation, etc.

LN: How long have you been in the printing business?
DH: Since 1978. I grew up in photoengraving and color separations, when they were done by camera, then by drum scanner. Now we use the scanner only about twice a year!

LN: There have been huge changes in printing since you started in the business. Do you miss any of the old methods?
DH: As we’ve made the transitions along the way, we sometimes missed the security and sense of control of the previous methods, but once a transition was made, we’ve rarely wanted to go back. For awhile the technology was changing every two years…now it’s more stable.

Prepress has changed the most. Catalogs used to take weeks in prepress. What used to take a week to build, now takes hours.

The chemistry is gone; we don’t miss that. Our industry is amazingly clean now. All the ink is vegetable-based, for the most part. We keep finding new substitutes.

LN: What else is new in the printing business?
DH: We’re using lots of innovative, tactile, visual elements, such as touché, a paper that feels rubberized… new coatings, like soft touch aqueous… spot coatings, UV, matt or gloss, raised, dimensional UV.…

LN: What do you wish your clients knew more about?
DH: As printing is evolving and the economy changing, ECG now works with people who aren’t only print buyers but purchasing agents of a wide variety of products and services. People in those positions aren’t always aware of the process inherent in offset printing, the time involved in each step. It’s not always as immediate as the digital world is. Custom, well-crafted print projects take time to do correctly.

Although prepress has become much more streamlined, printing and bindery (and techniques such as die-cutting) are still fairly labor-intensive and involving lots of hand work. They can be automated, but that only makes sense for very large jobs. Small to medium-sized jobs can still involve a lot of skilled handwork.

Bindery and finishing are where you can make a project unique. Lots of places can put ink on paper, but really the scope of the whole project and the end result is what you’re after. ECG works backward from the desired end result—how it folds, the stitching, etc., because we have all that and can control all those variables. In the end, your project will look like a million bucks.

Linda Norlen interviewed Dave Holcombe in July 2010.