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Dublin city-based printer GP Digital and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) walked off with the biggest prize in Irish Printing when they won the ‘Print of the Year’ 2011 award at the 34th Irish Print Awards ceremony held this year in Dublin’s Clontarf Castle Hotel on Thursday, 1st December 2011.
With 17 category winners to choose from, the judges choose “Night Prayer” from the ”Book Printing” category as the overall winning entry. GP Digital and NCAD took the top honours in this category which was sponsored by The Reprocentre.
The awards recognise and reward the quality of design, printing and finishing involved in the production of a wide range of printed material, including newspapers, magazines, books and marketing collateral, as well as variable data print, print packaging, label printing and vehicle wraps.
We have talked before in Digital Print News about the synthesis of digital print and traditional print and the winning entry “Night Prayer” is typical of that collaboration at its highest level.
Night Prayer came about when Mary Plunkett, a research MA student in Visual Communications at NCAD decided to produce a modern, contemporary book on Night Prayer. Now add in the fact that the book would have digital print, litho as well as etchings and you can see the complexity of the project.
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Nyssan Deeb, Director of GP Digital explained:
“It was GP Digital’s third year to enter the awards and the third year to receive a nomination,” she said. “It was very much a collaboration between Mary and GP Digital in that she did a section of the book which was letterpress with etchings involved and we did other sections which were printed on our Xerox 700 digital press.”
Deeb commented that the reason GP Digital was chosen as the printer by Plunkett had its origins when she attended the awards back in 2010.
“I was sitting beside Sean Sills, print tutor at the NCAD and explained to him what we did. I gave him my card and he obviously passed on the details to a number of students. When Mary approached us this year with her project it involved a lot of discussion about what type of stocks would be suitable for a mixture of digital and litho work. So it wasn’t just a matter of receiving a file and going to print.”
The production of the book, from concept and design through to finished product, spanned a two year period. It comprises of 142 pages, printed on 175gsm Zerkall mould-made acid free paper with the text pages digitally printed by GP Digital on its Xerox 700 press. All of the letterpress was printed by hand, as was all the gilding and the illustrations. The book has a hardback cover and is case bound. A total of 26 copies were finally produced.
Plunkett said she found GP Digital a terrific partner to work with.
“I had to select papers that worked with letterpress, digital and etching processes because I wanted to keep the paper constant throughout the book and they were a great help in terms of answering questions and supplying print samples and we were delighted with the quality of the end product.”
Nyssan added:
“The challenge for GP Digital was to ensure that the digital aspect of the project matched Mary’s requirements at every stage and I think the end result proved that we could do this.”
GP Digital was established in 2004, and today employs four people. A significant amount of their business is large-format printing and finishing and the remainder is small-format work which typically includes booklets, brochures, flyers leaflets and reports, along with the work they produce for NCAD students.
“Night Prayer” is being sold to private libraries and book collectors and half of the print run has been sold already, including a copy that has gone to the rare books section in Trinity College Dublin. Another copy was bought by the National Library and one has also been bought by the National Library of Visual Arts.
