Chicago, IL – GPA, the market leader in substrate solutions for offset, digital, and wide format printing, announces the winners of their 2015 Print & Design Contest, which honors excellence and creativity in printing. Companies across North America submitted their entries on GPA substrates to compete in eight product categories for the Best of Category award; from the eight winning entries, one was chosen as Best of Show. 

Oregon Printing Communications won this year’s Best of Show award for their creative spin on a corporate capabilities booklet in the Ultra Digital^® Papers 2 category. The company, located in Dayton, OH, wanted to create a marketing piece that went beyond a list of services. They wanted to truly inspire their clients through stunning design, innovative printing techniques, and uniquesubstrates. Amanda Pond, Marketing & Development Manager at Oregon, created the concept and worked with their digital print team leader, Jim Hoelscher, to bring it to life. The result is a striking booklet that cleverly plays withink, substrates, opacity, light, and texture.

“Our main goal is to inspire people to do new and different things with print, and that’s exactly what our winning piece does. Seeing something like this win Best of Show is a tremendous amount of validation for the work that we do,” shared JuddPlattenburg, President at Oregon Printing Communications.

Oregon used five different GPA substrates in their booklet, including pearlescent, color, translucent, photo and uncoated papers. Plattenburg shared why they chose GPA papers for their project: “GPA has so many cool substrates for our HP Indigo press, available in the quantities we need, when we need them. That gives me the confidence that we can create groundbreaking pieces that inspire our customers, which helps them succeed. As a result, we become their trusted partner and share in their success.”

The Best of Category winners are:

Bay State Envelope of Mansfield, MA – GPA Wide Format Substrates

Chromatic Inc. Lithographers of Glendale, CA – Ultra Bak^® Plus & Ultra Bak^®Classic Pressure Sensitive Papers­­­­­­­­­

Ace Commercial of Santa Fe Springs, CA – Ultra Film^® Pressure Sensitive Synthetics 

Original Impressions of Miami, FL – Ultra Film^® Non-Adhesive Synthetics

OneTouchPoint Mountain States of Denver, CO – Ultra Digital^® Pressure Sensitive Papers

Tap Packaging Solutions or Cleveland, OH – Ultra Digital^® Papers 1

Crossmark Graphics of New Berlin, WI – Ultra Digital^® Synthetic Substrates

This year’s contest was judged by a panel of three industry experts: Deborah Corn, Principal, Chief Blogger, and Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse™ for Print Media Centr; Michael Johnston, President of Top Graphics in Maryland Heights, MO; and Bev Burger, President and Owner of Big 5 Marketing.

GPA’s Print & Design Contest is an annual opportunity for printers and end-users to showcase their best work and gain industry recognition. For a submission to be eligible, it must be from an actual job or promotion that was printed by a GPA customer on a qualified GPA substrate within the past year. This year marks a decade of the competition, which grows bigger and better each year, yielding new and unique examples of opportunities that GPA substrates create.