Samworth Inducted into FTA's Hall of Fame

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.—Mark Samworth, vice president of technology for EskoArtwork, is the 49th inductee into FTA’s Hall of Fame. He is a color scientist, who in the late 1970s stepped out of the traditional printing mindset and linked print outcomes with computer science.

At the time, few recognized that such insight would prove paramount to the advancement of an industry. Color management was yet to become a principle, but in the ensuing 30 years, Samworth became widely recognized as one of its founding fathers and its leading proponent in the world of flexography. DuPont’s Mark Mazur says of his colleague, “Color and curves have made Mark’s career.”

Samworth focuses on teaching people to do better flexo printing. He has traveled the country and the world calibrating scanners for flexo, presenting seminars on print reproduction, digital plate optimization, color management and expanded color gamut printing. His processes and procedures have been patented many times over. The names and techniques are familiar to many FTA members.

Intro to FTA

Long-time friend, Herb Schwart, general manager at Bizerba Label Solutions, Inc., in Forest Hill, Md., recalls Samworth’s early involvement in FTA. “While at RIT, the 1982 FTA Forum was held in Toronto, only about a three-hour drive from Rochester. Four students hit the road, including Mark. They had a chance to experience the industry in a whole different way by attending informative and exciting presentations about the advancements of flexo by day, and hobnobbing with the executives by night in the hospitality suites,” he says. “Those executives seemed, surprisingly, very welcoming of a few young students interested in a career in flexo.”

From that day forward, Forum has been a part of Samworth’s professional life. He took to the podium for the first time in 1995 in Orlando, where he challenged the industry to rethink the way it views and defines color to meet the present and future needs for standardization of color space. “If direct-to-plate is to be successful, an essential ingredient is the capability to equate computer color to proofing color to press color,” he noted. Samworth remains a fixture on stage, having given 17 presentations on flexography.