1      A Look Into AlsoDominie

Pushing the boundaries of print, Yanda and Justin visits the factory to find out more

22.05.11

WERKs, Wunderkind lookbooks/fashion invites, Pedderzines, Guerillazines and Frost Book

Set up in the early 2000s when the founder and managing director of Dominie Press¹, Oh Teng Hin, decided to diversify the business that he founded in 1979. alsoDoMinie², the creative engineering arm of Dominie Press, was set up specifically to take on specialised print jobs. One of its first was to print fabric ang pows for a major corporation. Soon after, they met Theseus Chan of WORK who was looking to print a book for photographer John Clang.

     Prior to this, Theseus had already tried to print the project at three other printers, but they all failed to deliver to his standards, recalls Teng Hin. “When he came to us, he warned us that if we can’t match the quality, he will reject it, so it was a huge challenge.” alsoDoMinie successfully delivered the book to Thesus’s standard, and it started the partnership they’ve had ever since. Most notably, the printer has been producing his bi-annual WERK magazine, each issue an experiment in print itself.

     While the new millennium was also a time when people thought print would die, Teng Hing says that this was not why he went into specialised printing. The 78-year-old confesses that he is very used to ordinary mass market printing and is thankful that alsoDoMinie’s director Junny Saw pushed him to take on these difficult jobs to diversify the business. “My reaction to many of these jobs has often been ‘What is this?’. She will say, ‘Okay. We’ll let you know’ and she will find a way out,” he says.

     Such patience and willingness to experiment has begun to pay off as the company has seen a growing demand for its services around the world in the last few years, says Teng Hin. While most of its clients are currently local, some 35 per cent of them are global, including the likes of Melbourne-based Vince Frost and recent D&AD winner Swallow Magazine.

Pedderzine: Workship, Devotion, Power.

Guerillazine 6 and 5. Individually burnt / finished with holes

     alsoDoMinie’s print work may look like products of a technically complex production process, but Teng Hin reveals that it all boils down to the human touch. “It is printed on the same machines, and any company can do it because the technology is there,” he says. Agreeing with him, Junny says the jobs they do are simply more laborious, less efficient and requires a lot of careful planning. “It’s not just take and print,” she explains. “Maybe a lot of other printers don’t want to take on the hassle because to them every bit of time is money.”

     Indeed, there have been occasions when a project has lost money because it took more hours than planned to complete. Still, Teng Hin takes it in his stride, “Every project is a new challenge. It’s a chance to explore new techniques.” By and large, however, most of alsoDoMinie’s jobs are moneymaking, but it is still supported by the ordinary mass printing jobs that Dominie Press does.

Underscore Magazine #1 by Hjgher

     To Junny, getting the company to take on such difficult jobs is also a way of supporting creatives who want to push the boundaries of their work. Moreover, mass market print jobs come and go, and are not samples of work she would keep to remember. “But if you print something like these, it becomes something so part of us,” she says, admiring the table full of publications by designers like WORK, Asylum, Hjgher, ohplay, and Immortal. “We are so proud that we are able to do stuff like that.”

     Every piece of work that alsoDoMinie showed that day seemed like a personal engagement, an invitation for the printer to express its adventurous spirit and heighten the experience of print and paper. There is no doubt that the publications were the fruit of much brainstorming, research and countless failures. By tearing, burning, wetting and drying, painting on, tampering with, and lacquering paper by hand — alsoDoMinie is like an artist in its own right, taking on such risky and laborious experiments to pave the way for new possibilities in design. While designers are often credited alone for the creative output, in my opinion, this printer certainly deserves equal recognition with the people whom we label as ‘creatives’ today.

www.dominie.com.sg


Text by Justin Zhuang / Yanda.
Images courtesy of D&AD and WORK.
This article is an except from The Design Society Journal no. 2.