Antwerp, March 8 2006 – The Belgian company Inventive Designers has become a member of IBM’s international AFP Color Consortium. That is a global workgroup of top businesses from the output industry with a focus on reliability, quality and consistency in high volume color printing. One of the goals is the development of an open standard for color management in AFP printing. Inventive Designers, a company that builds software solutions for personalized communications, is the only Belgian member of the consortium.

Guy Dehond, CEO of Inventive Designers: “Being a software company we want to play an active role in the development of the market. The development and improvement of standards and a quality commitment are critical elements thereof. Our participation to this international consortium is cemented on our daily experiences with customers – both national as international. We are delighted that we get the chance to design the future of color in document output together with other top companies from the industry. Such a pioneer role perfectly fits our image as an innovative software company. ”

The AFP Color Consortium was founded in 2004 by IBM and today counts about twenty authoritative organizations among which IBM, Océ, Xerox and Group 1. They jointly define, develop and promote an architecture allowing to transmit and print color in a precise and uniform way via all possible AFP systems. The intention is to extend the AFP standard and at the same time to guarantee the interoperability between all elements of the workflow.

Advanced Function Printing (AFP) includes IBM’s printer software and hardware facilitating control and reproduction of documents and information regardless of the devices used. AFP is mainly used in large businesses with print departments and sophisticated high-volume printers.

“The use of color in communication is increasingly getting cheaper. Consequently more and more companies are using color in their customer communications,” explains Nick Hofstede, Business Executive of Inventive Designers for the AFP Color Consortium. “Color support is hence becoming more important but the market lacks uniform standards. If today a company with international braches for instance wants its logo printed in exact the same color on a printer in the US branch as on a printer in the European branch, problems are guaranteed.  It is therefore necessary to establish a new color standard in order to avoid such issues.”
 
After the publication of the first specifications, the participating companies will continue to develop the standard in function of new market needs.

More information about the AFP Color Consortium: http://www.afpcolor.org/