BYU’s Best of Show 
A Long Time Coming

Brigham Young University last won the In-Print Best of Show award in 1995. Since then, Doug Maxwell, director of BYU's Print & Mail Production Center, has watched dozens of his in-plant's excellent pieces fall just short of the grand prize.

"We've had a number of good pieces over the years, and we've come so close," he says.

So at this year's IPMA awards banquet, as he watched the video showing the judges picking the winner, he tried not to get his hopes up. Even when there were only five pieces left on the judging table and two of them were BYU's, he stayed calm.

But when the judges held up BYU's booklet and proclaimed it the Best of Show winner, he finally let his excitement show through.

"It was awesome!" he proclaims. "I was really pleased. It was a challenging piece for us."

Challenging because each of the booklet's eight pages had an intricate die-cut, all of them done in-house on a very old Heidelberg press.

"They were very unique die-cuts in that the pages were all folded and so the front had to match the back side of the sheet," Maxwell explains.

Important Recruiting Piece

This complexity was integral to the job, he explains, as this piece was used by LDS Philanthropies to recruit donors for the BYU Center for Animation. The piece uses illustrations done by the animation department and scenes from animated features produced at BYU to entice donors from studios like Disney and Pixar.

"Whenever we do a recruiting piece like this, it is intense with graphics and specialty cuts and binding," Maxwell says.

The piece was designed in Adobe InDesign by freelancer Val Taylor. He worked closely with LaMont Schofield, a consultant with the in-plant, to make sure everything went smoothly.

"From the initial ideas, we were involved," notes Maxwell. "We really work to engineer jobs more than just be order takers."

The Job Begins

After the design was completed, PDFs were sent to the in-plant via an FTP site. Lisa Nelson output proofs on the shop's Epson printer and a mock-up was created. Once it was approved, Dave Simpson burned the plates on a Fuji Saber CTP device.

The cover was printed on a six-color, 32˝ Akiyama press run by Randy Edwards and Chris Roundy using 120-lb. Sterling Ultra cover sheets. The inside was printed on a five-color, 40˝ Heidelberg run by Gilbert Peay and Ken Simmons using Sterling Ultra 100-lb. cover sheets. The shop printed 2,000 of the booklets.

Because the in-plant has an Agfa Apogee CIP3 closed-loop system, colors were set in prepress. Operators pulled and scanned sheets frequently during the press run, and the system told them which colors to adjust.

Daniel Niu handled the die-cutting. A new die was created for each section. This was exacting work.

"He had to get them just right," says Maxwell.

After this, pages went to Daunine Beck who trimmed them on a Polar cutter. Folding was done by hand using a crew of BYU student workers, supervised by Kelly Sanderson, foreman. They then assembled the books and side stitched them on a Fox 321 hand stitcher. Tape binding and corner rounding were done by hand.

Maxwell looks on the final product with pride. Though it was a true challenge, he's grateful his in-plant got the opportunity to do it.

"It's nice to work at a place where you get opportunities to do pieces like this occasionally," he remarks. "Sometimes it's a matter of turning machines on and running them, and then you get opportunities like these to really prove your workmanship and your abilities...your craft. And we have some just phenomenally talented individuals that work here."