GP Digital and the National College of Art and Design received the highest accolade in the Irish printing industry when they scooped the Irish Printer magazine ‘Print of the Year’ 2011 award.
The overall award winner was selected from 17 category winners in the most prestigious award ceremony for the print and packaging industry on the island of Ireland.
The winning entry, ‘Night Prayer’, was selected from the books printing category. GP Digital and the National College of Art and Design took the top honours in this category.
The 2011 Print of the Year is an outstanding example of the fusion of traditional and modern printing craftsmanship at its very best. The Night Prayer book project came about through Mary Plunkett, a student at the National College of Art and Design who was doing a two-year research MA in Visual Communications and wanted to produce a modern, contemporary book on Night Prayer. All the text pages are digitally produced and the illustration sections are letterpress and some etchings. There are also letterpress elements introduced on the digital pages. ‘GP Digital was a terrific print partner for us,’ says Mary Plunkett. ‘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.’
GP Digital director and co-founder Nyssan Deeb describes winning the Irish Printer magazine Print of the Year Award and the Book category award as ‘fantastic – it is a great privilege to win the award. We are both shocked and delighted’. It was GP Digital’s third year to enter the awards and their third year to receive a nomination, having been nominated in the Digital Print category in 2009 and 2010.
In a nice piece of symmetry, Nyssan Deeb was sitting beside Sean Sills, print tutor at the NCAD, at the 2010 Irish Print Awards and she told him about their business. He passed their name onto the students at NCAD. Mary Plunkett then decided to contact GP Digital when she was looking for a digital printer to produce her Masters project. While Mary handled most of the letterpress side of the project, Nyssan says the challenge for GP Digital was to ensure that the digital aspect of the project matched Mary’s requirements. The company, which was established in 2004, employs four people. Up to 70% of their business is large format printing and finishing and the remainder is small format work, including booklets, brochures, flyers leaflets and reports, along with the work they produce for NCAD students.
The 142-page ‘Night Prayer’ publication was printed on 175gsm Zerkall mould-made acid free paper on a Xerox 700 press. The book has a hardback cover and is case bound. The production of the book, from concept and design through to finished product, ran over a two year period. Printing began in February 2011 and was completed in May. ‘The print run was only 26 books but all of the letterpress was printed by hand, as was all the gilding and the illustrations.
‘Night Prayer’, which can be purchased for €600 a copy, 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 which was bought by the National Library and one that has been bought by the National Library of Visual Arts. The beautiful book was also exhibited in an artists book fair in Temple Bar this month.
The Irish Print Awards, now in its 34th year, was celebrated at a glittering ceremony in Dublin’s Clontarf Castle Hotel on Thursday, 1 December 2011.
