'Consistently Excellent'

Every August, the pages of packagePRINTING are packed with honors and accolades for the winners of the annual Excellence Awards competition. While the converters and the work they do are certainly worthy of the attention, each year there’s a group of unsung heroes that makes it all happen.

Without the judging panel, the competition would not exist and with this being the 30th annual edition of the awards, we wanted to use this space to share some of the judges’ comments about this years’ entries, and some of their key takeaways from a day of scrutinizing about 200 packaging samples.

On Thursday, June 23, five judges, whose areas of expertise span all aspects of the package printing industry made the trek from around the country to packagePRINTING headquarters in Philadelphia.

The group featured a returning core from last year – Bill Enright, application engineer for Mark Andy; John Maurer, product support specialist for Kodak; and John Hennessy, a product manager for EFI.

We also had a new face join the panel – Kevin Schilling, technologies specialist for Anderson & Vreeland, and a judge who returned to the competition for the first time in several years – Mark Mazur, digital prepress consultant for DuPont.

While it is the judges’ job to critique each individual entry and assess its strengths and weaknesses, the panel noted that this crop of entries was particularly impressive. In particular, Mazur said he was impressed by how the gap in quality is substantially more narrow between the multiple print processes used in packaging.

“One of the things that stood out to me is just how competitive flexo is against offset these days,” he said. “You see a lot more flexo samples than you might have in the past and they all look very good … You also see a lot more digital samples, especially in large print formats and it’s becoming competitive from a cost standpoint and a quality standpoint with the other print processes.”

The judges who returned to the competition after taking part last year said they were impressed by how much the crop of entries had improved in the span of just one year. Maurer echoed Mazur’s sentiments that when it comes to high-quality printing, flexography and digital are both challenging offset.

“Being a judge for two years now, I was impressed by the increase in print quality that seemed to be evident in this year’s entries, especially the flexo and digital entries,” he said. “Selecting the winning entries was much more difficult this year because there were so many high-quality entries.”

While at its core, the packagePRINTING Excellence Awards is a printing competition, it’s getting difficult to ignore the increasingly substantial role that finishing and special effects is playing in packaging. Schilling says he was particularly impressed with how many entries combined strong elements of print with innovative methods of going a step further to stand out on shelf.

“No longer are you just seeing line work ink or process ink on a substrate,” he said. “What we saw a lot of was special effects, including glitter, opal tones and holographs. There was a lot being added in with the printing besides just four-color process and line work onto the substrate.”

As described on page 10, the flexographically printed label for Girls’ Night Out Wines 2014 chardonnay received the competition’s top honor as best of show. While the judges were all impressed by its crisp printing and precise registration, Enright explained that its use of special effects were part of what clinched its Best of Show distinction.

“It was a great print job incorporating many decorative effects, which added to the label’s complexity,” he said. “There was an interesting mix of different images to add to this label’s appeal.”

It’s amazing to consider just how far printing and packaging has come since packagePRINTING first started hosting this competition in 1987. With three full decades in the books, we can only imagine what the judges will be saying after another 30 years. But for now, it’s exciting to just think about what may be in store for 2017.

“Many of the categories were filled with excellent work and it was difficult to choose the winners in many cases,” Hennessy said. “Print quality across the entries was consistently excellent.”