Behind the Scenes: Making of a Magazine
When you hold an issue of Ytori magazine in your hands, you’re witnessing the result of many people working tirelessly to bring each issue to life. Before it makes its way to you, it takes months for our magazine team to strategically plan each issue, craft content, secure images, and design each layout. Once each decision has been made and the designs revised to precision, it’s off to the printer, where the process really speeds up — in a flash, the digital files are transformed into a tangible publication.
To observe the process firsthand, our magazine team made the trek down to sunny Miami, the home base of our print partner for Ytori magazine. As one of the nation’s largest minority-owned printing companies, Solo Printing boasts a passionate staff of over 165, impressive resources for color lithography, and an overarching mission to change printing for the better. The company is regarded in the printing industry for its use of eco-friendly technology, earning multiple environmental certifications from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council. To give back to the planet, they partner with the nonprofit One Tree Planted to plant trees for every job sold.
Solo’s 180,000-square-foot facility hosts monumental machinery, including top-of-the-line sheetfed presses and the nation’s only AI-powered machine geared toward assisting with print production. Solo handles all facets of the production process in-house, from prepress to mailing.
When we arrived on site for our tour and press check, we were greeted by Business Development Manager Freddy Latour. A UF Warrington College of Business alumnus, Freddy knows the power of a Gator-produced publication. He gave us a full tour of the facility, walking us through corridors of towering paper stock and whirring machinery.
Sometimes, the imagery you see on a digital file does not translate the same to paper — colors can look vastly different. During our press check, we had the chance to see our digital files transformed into large folios, meticulously checked by the prepress specialists for the correct colors and formatting. We could view each spread of the magazine to adjust settings when needed. We made a few subtle corrections for ink saturation and color and once we gave the green light, the print run began (nearly 14,000 issues in total).
We watched with excitement as a high-speed press cranked out our very first copies of the fall issue in a flurry of movement. Then, the pages were sent over to the bindery area of the facility, where fully automated equipment uses recognition cameras to cut, fold, and bind the issue into a cohesive magazine. Solo’s mailing department then seamlessly coordinates delivery to mailboxes all over the nation!
Read more from the fall 2022 issue of Ytori magazine.Â