Three Australian printers have emerged as winners at the Printing Innovation with Xerox Imaging (PIXI) Awards held in October recently. 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 year’s expanded program of 42 awards were open to a global network of 800 of the world’s 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, says, “We were thrilled to learn that our entry was successful in this year’s PIXI awards, especially after seeing the standard of work we were up against.”
He continues, “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 for Body of Work was managed using colour profiles on The Digital Centre’s Xerox iGen3 digital colour production press. The catalogue contained spot UV throughout, featured a matt celloglazed embossed cover and was perfect-bound.
Meanwhile, Allan Marden, digital print manager at Griffin Digital described their winning book, Rooftops, as a challenge to produce.
He says, “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.”
Brett Maishman, national commercial print business manager for Fuji Xerox says this year’s award theme of environmental initiatives in new business applications was a particularly good match for the local digital market’s commitment to sustainable practices.
Maishman says, “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."
