2018 Excellence in Flexography Awards Recap

Judging the 2018 Excellence in Flexography Awards

The analogy between snowboarding and flexography starts to fall apart when we get into the judging process. There, six judges critique a jump’s difficulty, style, height and landing. Here, there’s also a half-dozen judges grading each entry, but it’s not the same six individuals scoring them all: Each entry is assigned a category, and each of those categories has its own group of judges, knowledgeable specifically in the segment which they are grading.

Within a given category, the six judges are separated into two groups: one tasked with evaluating a print’s degree of difficulty and the other its level of execution. The degree of difficulty group looks at various aspects of each print and evaluates how complex they are on a scale from one to 10: Substrate printability/ink compatibility, registration tolerances, plate-printing complexity/fineness of print, screen (lpi or stochastic spot size), tonal range (on screen and process jobs) and defect detectability. Finally, these judges can award bonus points if a job really goes out of its way to up the ante.

Once the degree of difficulty group has weighed in, an entry is passed to the level of execution group. Its task is to evaluate how well a print’s various elements have been implemented, also on a one-to-10 scale. Specifically, these judges look at image sharpness, ink coverage, registration, dot/screen/vignette (again, on screen and process jobs) and consistency; they, too, can award extra points for any job that really sticks the landing.

The degree of difficulty group scores a print and passes it to the level of execution group to do the same, and this hand-off takes place for every single entry. Each print’s two scores are then summed and the entries in each category are sorted from highest to lowest. When all of a category’s entries are graded, its two groups come together to deliberate award allocations. Each print is eligible for either a gold, silver or bronze award—from each category’s pool of gold-award-winning prints, a Best of Show is chosen—and those awards are given solely at the judges’ discretion.

2018 Excellence in Flexography Awards Judging Committee — The Awards Committee: (from left) Paul Teachout, Bob Loescher, Lon Robinson, Tim Esselman, Geoff Roznak, Caryn Kuehl, Tim Reece, Alix Guyot, Paul Lancelle

Assisting the judges are members of the awards committee, itself a collection of Excellence in Flexography Awards judging veterans. They included:

Kodak’s Paul Lancelle, the committee chair and a member of the FTA Hall of Fame
WestRock CP LLC’s Tim Esselman, assisting the combined corrugated and preprinted linerboard groups
Anderson & Vreeland’s Alix Guyot, assisting the mid web and wide web A groups
ProAmpac’s Caryn Kuehl, assisting the mid web and wide web A groups
Nilpeter USA Inc’s Bob Loescher, assisting the narrow web group

FTA Hall of Famer Mark Mazur, assisting the wide web B group
All Printing Resources Inc’s Tim Reece, assisting the wide web B group
Tension Corp’s Lon Robinson (the 2018 FTA Hall of Fame inductee), assisting the envelope group
Great Northern Corp’s Geoff Roznak, assisting the combined corrugated and preprinted linerboard groups
Nilpeter USA Inc’s Paul Teachout, assisting the narrow web group
Harper Corporation of America’s Sean Teufler, assisting the wide web B group

There is no hard and firm criteria for what makes an entry award-worthy. It is a moving target that incorporates how difficult it was to print a job and how well it executed on its design, the caliber of the competition and the general level of quality seen throughout the industry. Printers can only control how well they print, so they have to choose complex jobs and execute them flawlessly. If we assume every printer has that mindset, and that they all are keeping up with the latest technological advancements, machinery upgrades and capabilities befitting flexography in 2018, it makes it that much more difficult to truly stand out and earn an award.

Excellence in Flexography Awards Tallies, 2014-2018

One category—wide web—managed to collect more awards than even last year, but that came as the result of what one awards committee member called the best execution he’s seen since 2015. Of the remaining five categories, one had the same number of awards as last year, and the other four all had less. In total, there were 114 award winners.

It would appear the bar is being raised on what constitutes an award-worthy print. On Jan. 28 and 29 at the Hyatt Regency Long Island, just minutes from FTA’s office, 30 judges—industry members who know their way around a package—reinforced that viewpoint.