16th Annual pP Excellence Awards

Inland Paperboard and Packaging's Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs stood its ground in pP's 16th Annual Excellence Awards competition, notching out a first place and Best of Show.

THE PACKAGING FOR Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs goes to show that sometimes, bigger is better.

Standing at about 75˝ tall, Inland Paperboard and Packaging (a Temple-Inland Co.) designed this display packaging to draw on the wine's deep colors and unique style. Like many of this year's entries, the Chandon package stood out as one of the industry's best. "Considering the size and complexity of this job, the printer held amazing register," commented Excellence Awards Judge Cordes Porcher, senior technical service rep. (graphics), Board Sales Division, Smurfit-Stone Container. "The bar has been raised—yet again!" Before winning the judges' overwhelming support for the Best of Show award, the Domaine Chandon package raked in enough points in the Corrugated (Preprint)—Flexo (Process) category to edge past Packaging Technologies' Apple & Eve submission. Additionally, Inland's Coors packaging took first place in the Corrugated (Preprint)—Flexo (Line) category.

Here's the low down on this year's Best of Show winner:

Inland Paperboard and Packaging

Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs

• Prepress was done internally on a Mac G3 and assembled on a Barco Workstation.

• The plates are .045˝ DuPont Digital DPS Photopolymer with a .040˝ compressible 3-M and R-back stickyback.

• The package was run on a 98˝ Fisher & Krecke CI Press.

• Inks and varnish are water-based Flint Ink products on a premium clay-coated paper by WestVaco, 75˝ 40#.

• Aniloxes are Praxair ceramic laser-engraved (Process 600/2.0, Line 330/5.0, Line 330/7.5, Varnish 180/18.0).

• Plate cylinders are Mah-Machine.

Technical achievement highlights include:

• 117 line screen, .012˝ traps, the main panel image of the couple is a sepia tone image created from an original four color scan.

• The four-color Chandon reverse is created out of four color and held in decent register.

• Shadow areas on the bottle were created with underlying colors (c,m,y,k) with a total saturation of 340 percent.

• Clean screen reproduction with solid gold overlay of line black.

This year, pP received more than 400 entries from companies nationwide. Topping the charts were Spectrum Label (Hayward, CA) and Hammer Lithographics (Rochester, NY), both with six award-winning entries. Asheville High School students received five awards in the two student-produced packaging categories, including first place in the Line printing category. Careerline Technical Center in Holland, Mich. took top honors in the Four-Color Process printing category. A complete list of winners is available as Adobe PDF files and requires Acrobat Reader. Page # in parenthesis represents actual page number in pP August 2002 issue.