PUBLICATION CENTER

Cessna’s image as the pinnacle of aeronautical engineering requires imaging that conveys this reality to its employees, its clients, and its prospects.

Cessna Aircraft Company was born shortly after the birth of aviation itself. Launched in 1927, Cessna has since produced some 192,000 aircraft, establishing the company as the world’s premier private aircraft company.

Given its history and reputation, Cessna has paid extra close attention to its image and the images of its aircraft.

For Cessna, it’s not a matter of trying to keep up with its perception, but to bring its high-flying reality into tight formation with perception.

Almost since the inception of the company, Cessna has had its own imaging department.

What began in 1943 as the company’s internal photo lab has morphed into a wide-ranging communications department that takes advantage of all the digital tools available, from videography to inkjet printing.

Digital Blue Yonder

Darrin LaCrone heads up Cessna’s Visual Media production division, which works in concert with some of the best photographers in the business to capture the art and engineering of Cessna aircraft for a variety of promotions, from Cessna’s global corporate locations to air shows the world over. Most of the photographers, including LaCrone, are employed by Cessna, which tries to keep as much of its work in-house as possible.

The key moment in this group’s evolution, says LaCrone, was the transition from a chemical process to digital. The challenge at the time was to maintain and even exceed the ultra high quality standards set by the lab in the previous 50 years or so.

The move to digital was first accomplished with a 24-in. wide Kodak Pegasus LED printer in the mid-90s. With a high monthly lease payment and the fact that it took five or six prints to get the quality demanded, LaCrone says, the Visual Media group soon rolled its resources into Epson inkjet printers.

“When we first started working with the Epson printers we experimented with a number of luster photo papers. They were nice looking, but soft and not very durable.  So we started looking for something with a luster surface that was more durable and found LexJet. We jumped over to LexJet’s Sunset Photo eSatin Paper and liked it a lot. It’s a lot tougher and handles the color real well,” says LaCrone.

LaCrone says the Visual Media division has increasingly diversified its material options to keep up with the demand to make a lasting visual impression at corporate facilities, air shows, and other events. Wall coverings printed on LexJet’s 11 Mil WallPro, canvas wraps on LexJet Instant Dry Satin Canvas, and lightweight banners on LexJet Water-Resistant Satin Cloth are now staples of Cessna’s marketing.

“People call up and ask for something new all time, so I call our LexJet account specialist, Barrett Simms, and he gets back to me right away with an idea. Then you not only have something for the project at hand, you’ve got something in your arsenal of tools for the next time,” says LaCrone. “That’s how we came across the Water-Resistant Satin Cloth. We had a request for lightweight banners that would be displayed in front of an expensive plane, and the last thing you want is a big, heavy vinyl banner sitting on a metal banner stand catching the wind and slamming into the airplane. Barrett sent us a sample of it to print, and for what we do it’s beautiful and became a material that we lean on regularly. We always get good information and great customer service from LexJet, which was especially helpful when we first started out with inkjet.”

Consistency & Quality

Cessna’s photography requires picture-perfect reproduction, so color management and consistency take priority in the production workflow.  The entire system, from monitor to output device, is regularly calibrated and media profiles are checked and double-checked.

“When we get new materials in, we download the profile LexJet has built, print that, and then build a custom profile here for the same material. We look at both to see which one gives us a better rendition. The Instant Dry Satin Canvas profile we got from LexJet, for example, was dead-on and rendered beautifully, but we have to make sure we reduce the variables to the image itself,” explains LaCrone. “If the monitor’s profiled and the printer’s profiled to the specific media settings, the only variable is the image itself.”

LaCrone adds that this attention to color and image detail reduces waste. They have also identified the most common sizes printed and tend to gang up those sizes on specific Epson printers to further reduce waste and labor.

“Our workflow is done wisely, and the color management helps us make sure everyone’s happy when it comes off the printer,” says LaCrone.

Image is everything in advertising and marketing, and this is especially true for a company selling multi-million dollar high-performance aircraft to a very discerning clientele. The challenge for the Visual Media division, says LaCrone, is the internal marketing to Cessna’s some 16,000 employees to let them know about the division’s capabilities and how it can help boost sales.

In addition to dressing up conventions and air shows, of equal importance is promoting Cessna on-site at its various locations. When a Citation service center (Citation is a line of mid-size business jets) requested new images, Visual Media provided it with canvas wraps on LexJet Instant Dry Satin Canvas. The wraps were so unique and visually appealing, that the requests from other locations began to roll in.

“Since then, four of our service centers have nothing but canvas wraps. We use a local framer who will stretch the canvas. We put a black border on some of them, and others we invert the image on the border to give it a reflective effect,” says LaCrone.

The Visual Media division is in the process of bringing all of its printing services under one roof, including lithography, binding, and solvent wide-format printing, in addition to the photographic printing and display production the center currently handles.