DENVER, July 24 Mail-Well, Inc. today announced that its print group subsidiary Graphics Illustrated, Inc., a high- end general commercial printer located in Riviera Beach, Florida, won North American Printer of the Year Gold Award for the brochure category from Sappi Fine Paper North America. Considered one of the commercial printing industry's top honors, the North American Printer of the Year gold medallion was awarded to Mail-Well's Graphics Illustrated subsidiary for superior printing craftsmanship of a highly complex, oversized, spiral-bound, stepped-off page, marketing brochure. Graphics Illustrated printed the brochure for Young & Rubicam to promote the ad agency's newspaper, magazine, billboard, poster, brochure and comparison card marketing campaign for Ericsson wireless telecommunications products. "What made this piece interesting to produce was the pure craftsmanship that was required in every phase of the project, not only in the printing itself but in the trimming, color matching and registration,'' said Roger Butler, President of Graphics Illustrated. "We were honored to receive this recognition from our peers for a complex piece of work.'' The design and content of the 17" x 11.5'' nineteen-page booklet printed by Graphics Illustrated details Ericsson's multi-tiered South American marketing strategy with the use of close-up photographic visuals of human faces painted in vivid colors overlaid with Internet search engine graphics, stock quotes, travel and weather information graphics and other features. The booklet incorporates 26 additional step-cut pages in varying sizes which require precise cutting, registration and binding to perfectly match underlying visuals appearing throughout the brochure. Printers from across North America submitted more than 2,800 entries in this year's Printer of the Year competition, which were judged by four independent experts from the North American printing industry. Graphics Illustrated will now compete against commercial printers from around the globe for the Sappi International Printer of the Year medallion, which is to be awarded in Hong Kong in September. Sappi Fine Paper North America, sponsor of the printing award competition, is a division of Sappi Limited, the world's largest coated wood-free paper manufacturer. Graphics Illustrated is a state of the art, computer-to-plate, digital-to-press, sheet-fed commercial printer, that started in 1979 as a small print shop and has grown to a $14 million, diversified high-end printing organization. The firm was acquired by Mail-Well in 1998.