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Highlights: The Making of the Sylvamo Stock Source Guide

The Stock Source Guide is exactly what it sounds like: a comprehensive guide to the ever-growing product offerings from six of the most dependable and versatile paper brands in the business. For printers, this guide is an invaluable resource and is often consulted daily.

Every printer’s right-hand guide

Each section features a quick reference guide for an overview of stock choices, including extensive digital choices and recycled options, as well as in-depth details for everything a printer needs to know to serve customers, price jobs and find the right paper at a moment’s notice. The guide also contains sales aids to make weight and cost calculations easier than ever. 

International Paper Stock Source Guide

As eye-catching as it is useful

For the latest edition of the Stock Source Guide, we wanted to update the design and find a look worthy of this indispensable tool. We knew the design should be classic, to signify the ongoing utility of the guide, but we also wanted it to convey the creativity and innovation that drives Sylvamo. With these two goals in mind, we decided to experiment with overprinting for the design of the Stock Source Guide.

Overprinting is the process of printing over something that’s already been printed. In the case of the Stock Source Guide, we printed one color over another to a create a third color. Working solely with cyan, magenta and yellow, we created shades of green, red, purple, orange and deep blue. To create black, we printed all three colors, one over the other.

Most design programs have an overprint simulation feature, but you really can’t know what the effect is going to look like until you proof it. It took trial and error — and multiple press proofs — to get the right look, and in the end we added additional black ink to achieve a truly rich black. (The CMY overlay ended up looking like a printer’s error, and nobody wants that!)

Each paper brand in the Stock Source Guide is represented on its introductory page by a single italic letter — A for Accent Opaque, W for Williamsburg, S for Springhill and so on. The design offers a zoomed-in view of the elegant curvatures of the typography, details meant to evoke the detail one can achieve when printing on these papers. Combined with the overprinting technique, the choice of this elegant typeface, with its alternating thick and thin lines and the beautiful shapes created by its negative spaces, gives the pages a mid-century modern feel — a bold yet timeless statement on behalf of each brand.

 

An app for printers on the go

The Stock Source Guide is also available as a mobile app from the App Store and Google Play, complete with the intricate designs that make the latest edition the most visually appealing guide yet. The app updates automatically with new product offerings and details, so every printer can have at their fingertips everything needed to get the job done.