Product of the Month: The Arziro way to protect brand
Agfa’s Arziro Design promises to up the ante with layering approach of securing designs and protecting brands.
18 Sep 2015 | 1168 Views | By PrintWeek India
Earlier this year, in June 2015, Agfa Graphics introduced a new security design plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, which is believed to be a significant development in brand protection and anti-counterfeiting sector.
According to a European Commission report, 7-10% of world trade is infected by counterfeit goods, costing brand owners approximately EUR 500 billion. The report calculates counterfeiting as being responsible for the loss of around 2.5 million jobs across the G20 countries.
Anit Kumar Saha, lead consultant, software services at TechNova, says, “The Indian market has realised the importance of security design as a form of brand protection as well as an element of differentiation, and this will help popularise Arziro, which fills this requirement perfectly.”
Not that, there have not been any powerful tools in the general security market. Traditional brand protection solutions deploy holograms, OVD’s, taggants, serialisation, etc, at the end of the production process by the printer or the finisher. However, something which overlooks the most basic and critical element of graphic design makes Agfa a unique contender in the security printing arena.
Arziro Design is a dedicated product for the general security market inspired by Fortuna, Agfa Graphic’s high security design solution.
“The layout and graphic design is the most basic step of the overall printing process. Arziro is unique, as it enables the brand owner and graphic designer to add protection in the primary graphic elements of the package or document design,” says, Saha.
To achieve a solid brand protection and anti-counterfeiting programme, brand owners and printers have relied on a layered approach. According to Saha, Arziro is the ultimate tool in the layering process.
It gives complete control to the brand owner and graphic designer allowing them to create each design that can be as unique as their creativity allows them.The combination of aesthetics and security is in the hands of the graphic designer.
The bottom line, says Saha, is that security graphic design is now brought in-house, close to the package creation, resulting in increased control, full integration and reduced design costs.
Saha adds, “By themselves, the printing process and materials have zero or little protection; it is the inventive combination of many techniques including the graphic design that brings a harmonious intrinsic balance and unites all elements together to create the total layered solution.”
| SPECIFICATIONS |
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Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit or Windows 8.1 64-bi
Processor: Single Intel Xeon E5-1603 processor or higher
Memory: 8 GB RAM or more
Hard Disk: 500GB SATA disk
Video Card: Nvidia NVS 310
Monitor: 1280 x 800 monitor
Contact: Anit Kumar Saha, TechNova, +91 9920642420, anit.saha@technovaindia.com
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During a demo to the PrintWeek India, one thing is clear: The plug-in, which is available for both Mac and PC, works seamlessly with Adobe Illustrator CC2014 and allows the designer to incorporate existing designs with security elements. In addition, since the solution is parameterisable: a user can choose from pre-defined parameters or created custom ones, which makes it unique.
Arziro allows the graphic designer to create elements that are difficult to reverse-engineer. Typically, reverse-engineering, today, is done with commercially available off-the-shelf graphic design and desktop publishing software.These widely available products offer many tools, which make it possible to efficiently create simple illustrative graphics.
It was also clear: Arziro creates ultra-complex structures, anti-copy features and relief patterns that cannot be re-created by simple duplication or other basic tools that are commonly available in graphic software.
Arziro offers twelve security design tools to create counterfeit-sensitive designs. The solution also provides the opportunity to enhance already existing labels and packages with very complex and hard-to-copy Arziro designs.
| A Case-Study: The Power of Arziro |
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Saha explains the features with an example. The carton design illustrates the usage of Arziro as a very effective anti-counterfeiting tool, by highlighting two parts of a package.
Saha says, “The design was created in such a way that is uses the full output capabilities of the digital printing device (Xeikon3000 Series) using CMYK and one spot colour.”
The illustration (along side) clearly shows the complexity for a counterfeiter to reproduce the design without the proper tools and the original design elements.When trying to copy or to reproduce such a design, fine elements are lost and depending on the reproduction method parts of the designs are colourised. In this case it is instantly visible without the usage of magnification tools that the reproduction is fake.
Figure 2 - Enlargement of a part of a reproduction of the package using a printing device with the same resolution as the original.
‘Figure 3’ contains a magnification of a part of the original illustration. The black planes are obtained by using the Arziro Path Definition tool in combination with rich black. These elements have a glossy 3D effect on the original print, but almost invisible in the reproduced print (Figure 4). The fine details in the polygons are deteriorated and almost invisible to the naked eye.
Figure 4 - Enlargement of the reproduction
The complete design was created using Adobe Illustrator and a combination of the following tools: Special Rasters, Special Reliefs, Crystal Patterns, Path Definition, Line/Object Generator, Guilloche Library and Multiply.
With Arziro’s Special Rasters tool, any security screen one can think of can be created using custom design elements. This tool replaces a template design (such as a picture or a drawing) by a set of objects, which are positioned and modified according to the grey values of a template image or design. Very small, yet printable, line work elements compose exclusive customised screens.Security screens can generate interference patterns when copied.
The Crystal Patterns tool develops beautiful decorative patterns consisting of repeating shapes, based on crystal types appearing in nature.
Finestrokes and small objects make copying a problem.
With the Line/Object Generator tool patterns can quickly be generated and automatically fill selected objects with these patterns. This tool is typically used to create latent image designs,each of which filled with the same pattern at a different angle so that the individual objects are difficult to distinguish.
The Guilloche Libraryis used to create copies of pre-defined guilloches, which are repetitive patterns with very fine detail.
Multiply is a repetition tool to quickly create complex object patterns consisting of large numbers of repetitions based on a single object or several objects as a whole.
Opposite Ink Selector is a colour scheme exploration utility, but was not used to create the package design, as there was only one spot colour available. This utility tool is used to create colour schemes that are difficult to reproduce because the colours are out-of-gamut or completely opposite. The system will search the closest match for these colours in a specified Adobe Illustrator colour book.
According to TechNova, the Arziro Design Solution has been available since June 2015 and will be gradually improved by adding dedicated copy-sensitive design patterns and a SaaS (Software-as-a-service) solution to generate physical protection marks that can be authenticated using a smartphone.
In India, TechNova has been working with customers with specific requirements and helping them evaluate Arziro within their printing conditions and environs.
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| The Alternatives |
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Founder super line
The China-based company’s Super Line is an anti-counterfeit digital design software for producing printed products. Improvements in SuperLine 4.7, since its release in 2012 now supports full package and customized package with selected modules like texture, lace, microtext among others.
Jura high security design software
This proprietary software from Hungary-based company includes its flagship graphic design application to create and compose elements and finalise up-to-date graphic artwork of all kinds of security documents at top level, and additionally its optional software plug-in modules.
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