Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 1 May 2008

The recent NPA's held in Melbourne last week was another spectacular celebration of our craft, and it was encouraging to hear of plans to re-fresh some aspects of the process. This is to be encouraged and would simply reflect the evolution in technology and other changes within our industry that have occurred over the last few decades.

I admit there has been some criticism of the awards in the past, but can I make a positive suggestion: the problem is not with the judges. It's not with the standard of entries. And it's not even with the ear-splitting music and brain-snapping strobe-lights (well ... maybe, but I'd be showing my age).

Prompted by some thoughts from my colleague, Derek Fretwell, who recently put the NZ "Pride in Print" awards under the microscope (see Print 21 April issue) I believe the problem is with the actual categories themselves. They've remained frozen in aspic while much of the industry has moved on. At this point I'm not leaping in with the "perfect list" of awards, I'm simply flagging this as an issue that should receive some attention.

Why not have a contest, or at least call for interested parties to submit their preferred list? Perhaps Print21online could act as a forum, a kind of melting-pot to distill from the grass-roots members of our industry some kind of flavour for the quintessential awards list? Part of this process would be a tightening up of the definitions (eg, does "one-colour" mean a one-colour flexo label?) It may also require a tightening up of some of the "rules" (eg, can the same entry win multiple categories?)

Donning my armour-plated headgear, may I venture forth with a few suggestions to start the ball rolling?

  - Firstly, do we really need to reward that most basic of tasks, to produce a single-colour job? Surely we should place more emphasis on applied technology, such as "perfector" printed jobs, as these jobs require a special kind of skill and importantly - especially in the high-quality end of the market - it's a way of making print a more cost-effective medium.

  - Do we really need six different awards for magazines? I love magazines, but I'd like to see them rewarded for becoming such complex marketing-platforms (inserts, scratch'n'smell, coupons, sachets, etc) not just judged on their print quality.

  - Greater recognition of "digital" print in all its forms - document-management, virtual-offset, wide-format inkjet, transpromo, etc. By my calculations, sheetfed offset is capable of competing in about 20 of the existing categories and digital in about 14, so shouldn't digital print take home approximately 40% of the awards?

  - "Self-Promotion" surely by any reasonable defintion should mean "promotion of the printing company" - not "promotion of their clients", and yet there were winners of this award who were "clients" - not the actual printer! As the Chairman of Judges said in his introduction: "It is part of the judging process to ensure that entries are in their correct categories, and ... if ineligible, it is unfortunately disqualified." We await the Judges response. But seriously, for an industry struggling against other media, any efforts to showcase our own member-companies, and to demonstrate initiative at self-promotion, should be encouraged. There could be several categories representing large and/or small printing companies.

  - Similarly, what's the difference between a book and a booklet? How can the same entry win a Silver as a book, and a Silver as a booklet? Surely it's one or the other?

  - The same definitional issue applies to "Small Printing Business - less than 10 Staff" - the Silver being awarded to a design studio! I thought we were promoting printing companies - not their clients! (Another disqualification?)

  - How can a label win Gold in one category (Flexo Printing - which is a "process"), and get a Bronze in another (Labels - which is a "product")? This example highlights the problem we've created of mixing products and processes.

  - With magazines, especially those appearing frequently, how can one specific edition win an award but not its fellow versions before and after? One magazine won something for its "July 7th " edition. Was that edition specially "hot-housed" for the awards? Probably not, but with magazines, isn't consistency the real test - over several weeks or months?

These and other such issues should be debated in open forum - all of which would bestow a greater credibility on the awards themselves.

In fairness to the judges, they're wrestling with an outmoded classification system that's creaking under the load, creating anomalies such as the ones highlighted above (there are many more but I'm in danger of, if not already, becoming boring). Times have moved on over the last 25 years and we need a fresh new approach to defining our categories to reflect the modern idiom.

One approach which is worth considering, is to have a basic list consisting of products only (eg, Books, Labels, Annual Reports, etc) - and then each "product" category is split into "processes" (eg, "Books-Sheetfed Offset", "Books-Digital", "Books-Inkjet" - what!!! Books-Inkjet??? I'd like to see that. Well, you just might if you allowed such a category, instead of chucking all entries into the one bucket. Just a crazy thought.

Regards,

James Cryer
JDA Print Recruitment