2007 Gold Ink Awards

The 20th year of the Gold Ink Awards—the industry’s most prestigious print competition—featured some of the storied awards’ most impressive and highest-quality submissions to date. A talented team of judges poured through more than 1,400 entries in this milestone year, awarding Gold, Silver, Bronze and Pewter honors in 46 categories spanning a wide variety of printed products.

Printers and publishers submitted their finest pieces, and more than a dozen judges rolled up their sleeves to scrutinize and examine the entries’ each and every detail over four days in May at the Philadelphia headquarters of North American Publishing Co.—parent company of Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines—which hosts the awards. The competition has earned a reputation in the industry for attracting the highest-quality work from printing professionals worldwide, and this year’s crop of judges found the competition to be some of the stiffest in Gold Ink history.

“The Gold Ink Awards’ place in the industry is what the Academy Awards are to the motion picture industry,” says veteran Gold Ink judge Greg Captain, manager, The New Yorker Imaging Center. “The best of the best.”

The judges were particularly impressed by the Hardcover Books category, which garnered 16 total awards, the most among all book categories. The Children’s Books and Softcover Books categories were especially competitive as well, as each claimed nine awards.

“What I recall most from this year’s awards is the outstanding quality of the digital-printing entries. From labels to posters to books, both color and detail were extraordinary … even black-and-white pieces were impressive,” says fourth-year judge Gretchen Morris, director of global catalog production for Edmund Optics Inc. “This was a real eye-opener since just a few years ago, most digital printing was considered inferior to traditional methods.”

“In celebrating the 20th year of the Gold Ink Awards, we pay tribute to all of the breathtaking entries we continue to receive annually that make this competition the most important in the industry,” says Mark Hertzog, vice president/group publisher of Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines. “We are impressed year after year by the quality and the superiority of the submissions, and we look forward to another 20 years of recognizing the publishers and printers who produce the finest books in the world.”