Print Design:
First Place, Most Professional

Keith Nelson
Art Center College of Design

Black Box

Artist's Statement: This entry started out as a Neenah paper promotion, which was intended to update the Neenah Paper corporate identity and introduce eight colors in their Classic Columns cover weight. In doing so, I wanted to elevate another average paper promotional to a long-term advertising opportunity for Neenah Paper. It needed to promote their new colors, emphasize the cover weight and showcase physical qualities of the paper like tactile characteristics, as well as printing techniques like embossing, die-cutting, scoring, etcetera.

The solution was to create a sample that became a collectible. This would allow Neenah Paper to either spread the promotional out over time (i.e. monthly), or simply encourage designers to keep and display the paper. It combines fun, displayable planes with a practical mini swatch book. The sample is designed to keep the papers and Neenah prominent in minds (and offices) of designers. Overall, it allows Neenah Paper to invest their advertising budget into a project that defies the throwaway quality of many paper promotional.

The project is a series of pages, each with a perforated section in the upper left hand corner to allow for removal and storage of a miniature swatch book. The remainder of the page is then sacrificed as a designer removes the prescored, precut (die or possibly laser-cut) planes for assembly. Due to the scale of the project and the limited budget of my current client (me), I have not produced the illustrated assembly instructions, printing details and promotional copy in an accompanying handbook called the "Flight Manual." However, I have printed the Black Box, Red Pepper, Epic Black and Safari mock-ups on their respective papers, and included actual samples of the other papers with the redesigned Neenah logotype and mark inside the Black Box.

The planes were created by a repeat process of cutting and folding paper, scanning the cut pieces, placing the images into Illustrator®, printing, then cutting and folding again until the pieces fit together exactly. Poster layout and illustrations were also created in Illustrator.