Made in Oxford: Holywell helps CTSU with Oxford-China Fellowship conference

At Holywell, we love a challenge, and some projects test our skills on a number of different levels. A recent project for our customer, the Clinical TrialsServices Unit (CTSU) is a great example, calling for a range of competences, and requiring us to coordinate and deliver a range of disparate elements.

Part of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, a major section within the Medical Sciences Division of Oxford University, CTSU’s work chiefly involves studies of the causes and treatment of “chronic” diseases such as cancer, heart attack or stroke, as well as studies of other major conditions in developed and developing countries.

Hosting the Oxford-China Fellowship Conference, an event for Chinese delegates that takes place in Oxford, CTSU briefed us to support them with a package of services which, in addition to producing the conference programme, included printing personalised certificates for delegates, framing them, and providing overprinted jute bags – all while the conference was taking place!

Production of the programmes could not begin until the full itinerary for the Oxford China Fellowship was confirmed, and details were not finalised until immediately before the event was due to take place.  Cue our digital printing press and our perfect binding machine (see lastweek’s blog post for more information) – the perfect solution when we need to create high quality, professionally bound books at very short notice. What made this project a little different for us was that the text supplied for us to create artwork was in Chinese. While the designers in our studio are a very talented bunch, none of them is a fluent Chinese speaker! Not a problem, our customer supplied a Chinese proof reader to sit with our artworker and check our typesetting before we went to press with the full colour, A4, 30 page (26 pages of text and a 4 page cover) programme.

Our next challenge was to produce training certificates for each of the conference attendees, personalised with the delegate’s name and other details. We used high quality, heavyweight (300gsm) paper and printed the certificates digitally. We also sourced wood and glass frames, hand framing each of the certificates individually. Once again, because delegate details were only able to be confirmed last minute, production was carried out while the conference was underway.

The finishing touch for our CTSU project was to supply natural fibre jute ‘goodie bags’ for all delegates. We created artwork featuring the Oxford University crest and the Oxford skyline, and oversaw the screen printing of this image onto both sides of the bags.

By their nature, events are always likely to be subject to late changes, as itineraries, speakers, presentations and attendees can alter right up until the very last moment. Here at Holywell though, our ‘can do’ attitude and our responsive approach to print production means we are used to working under pressure and delivering to extremely tight deadlines.

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