Nuova Fima recently participated to Ceramic Design Forum, a specialized conference that took place on 9 and 10 April at the Spezzano Castle, a prestigious location that in a perfectly preserved medieval building includes the museum of Ceramics.

The Forum was organized under the supervision and rigorous organization of Gian Antonio Bertoni of Techna Group with a long history of successfully organized conferences that always bring innovation to the ceramic tile industry in terms of product, process and technology. The participation of public was well beyond expectations with over 300 visitors against the about 100 expected in each day. The public was a well spread representation of all sectors of the ceramic tile manufacturing, including managers and directors of ceramic tile manufacturing companies, experts of tile decoration, graphic design companies and production equipment manufacturers. Speakers at the conference presented a broad range of subjects that spaced between new tools to help designers in their work to examples of design that have marked the evolution styles to one case of a mere listing of the company’s own product history.

One of the most interesting and challenging presentation was surely from Philip Taylor, ex director of Polimoda, an agency that helped brands like Armani or Ferragamo with their design. The underlined message sent by Taylor, in not too subtle tones, was to increase dramatically the amount of design instilled in companies, at all levels of management hierarchies: “designers cannot sit in an office at the edge of the company building” - states Taylor - “in the 21st century, they must be well in its centre, involving at least one member of the board if not all of them”. According to Taylor having the concept of design accepted and promoted at all levels of the Italian ceramic tile manufacturing industry will help to keep up the name of made in Italy products for the years to come.

Nuova Fima, with its many years of tile decoration experience, presented the GEMA and GEMITA digital tile decoration systems. They are designed to be respectively a production system for the decoration line in the factory and a lab system to help experimenting with colours and images before passing the new designs to production. Both systems have been developed in collaboration with Jemtex, an Israel based digital decoration and printing technology company. GEMA and GEMITA use an inkjet system that resembles the technology used by standard paper printers. The substantial innovation introduced by these systems is to use a flow deflection system as an alternative to the drop on demand methodology used by similar machines. The flow deflection technology carries a number of functional and performance advantages because it guarantees a smooth and continuous decoration that avoids frequent interruptions for maintenance and cleaning of the decoration mechanisms.

While GEMA has been in use by a few tile manufacturers in the Sassuolo and Castellon area during the last few months, GEMITA is installed in 2 colour suppliers to help the development of both ceramic pigments and soluble glazes.