Business News
Australian digital printers scoop awards in first year of access to PIXIs
Friday 26. December 2008 - The Xerox PIXI Awards were opened to Australian entries for the first time in 2008, with stunning results for three of our best.
Three Australian printer providers emerged as winners at the Printing Innovation with Xerox Imaging (PIXI) Awards held at the Chicago History Museum in October. This is the first time since its inception seven years ago that the PIXIs have been open to entrants in the Asia Pacific region.
The annual PIXI presentations reward excellence and innovation in digital printing in the categories Books and Manuals, Collateral, Direct Marketing, New Business Application and Transactional Promotion.
This years expanded program of 42 awards were open to a global network of 800 of the worlds top printers in 48 countries. Around 100 companies from the Asia-Pacific region entered, with nine from Australia.
The Digital Centre, based in St Leonards in Sydney, won first prize in the Books and Manuals category for its submission, Body of Work – Free Spirit in the global judging section held in New York. National Australian company Griffin Digital (PMP Limited) received an honourable mention for their entry in the same category.
Blue Star GO, a division of the trans-Tasman Blue Star Print Group, won one of four Best in Region prizes during regional judging in Singapore.
Stuart Collins, Director of The Digital Centre, said about their win: “We were thrilled to learn that our entry was successful in this years PIXI awards, especially after seeing the standard of work we were up against. When we were approached by corporate design company Armstrong Miller + McLaren to produce this book, we saw an opportunity to utilise our production expertise in bringing together a mix of embellishment techniques that are traditionally associated with offset printing.”
The challenge of the Body of Work brief was to produce a digital book that stood up well against offset printed work. All photography reproduction was managed using colour profiles on The Digital Centres Xerox iGen3 digital colour production press. The catalogue contained spot UV throughout, featured a matt celloglazed embossed cover and was perfect-bound.
“For our customer, this catalogue of work was a true revelation that it can be perfect using digital print,” said Collins.
Allan Marden, digital print manager at Griffin Digital described their winning book, Rooftops, as “a bit of a challenge to produce”.
“The text pages are reversed-out images with 90 per cent black toner coverage. Typically, monochrome books have about five per cent type, excluding illustrations. This created some issues when printing, but we managed to get around the problems with the help of the Fuji Xerox technicians adjusting the amount of fuser oil and printing the book in the centre of the sheet,” he said.
Earlier this year, Rooftops also won Best Digitally Printed Monochrome Book at the Galley Club Awards in its digital print category.
With participation in the PIXI Awards considered an invaluable opportunity for international recognition, Brett Maishman, Fuji Xeroxs National Commercial Print Business Manager, actively encouraged local customers to enter to promote their exceptional capabilities in digital print production globally.
“This years award theme of environmental initiatives in new business applications was a particularly good match for the local digital markets commitment to sustainable practices. The winners have demonstrated sophisticated abilities and innovation such as embracing print on demand, adopting energy-reducing workflow automation tools, and the use of environmentally-efficient papers,” said Maishman.