Western Web wins a lot of awards at print quality competitions. That is because we have good equipment, great people running it and fantastic designers sending us cool stuff to print. In our eleven years we’ve won more regional and national print quality awards than any other web printer in California. A lot more.
Most recently we participated in the Visual Media Alliance (VMA ) awards. Last time we competed we won two silvers and one gold. We were pretty happy.
This year we entered six pieces and won six awards. Four silver and two gold. Twice as nice. We nearly wet ourselves!
Locally we won silver for Murphy’s Markets inserts. We won gold for North Coast Journal, with thanks to Art Director Holly Harvey and team. Plus gold for Pierson Building Center, with a tip o’ the hat to Advertising Manager David Hagemann.
In addition we won silver for:
J Weekly in San Francisco, a 150 year old weekly we print and deliver to SF and Oakland.
North State Parent, a monthly distributed all over the Northern Central Valley
SF Indie Fest, a program guide for a film festival we mail to over 40,000 people in the Bay Area
Winning gold at the VMA awards is something special. Many years ago we won Best of Show for open web printers at the national Web Offset Association (WOA). We entered the same piece in the VMA awards and received silver. Really?
I went to the awards luncheon mostly to see who beat us. All the winners’ samples were in glass cases, but I couldn’t find the gold winner. I asked the person in charge where I’d find the gold and he said, “We don’t always give Gold awards. Every entry is held to the same standard. Open web printing has never won gold.”
I was less than totally thrilled with this answer as each type of printing has its own standards. You can’t expect open web printing on newsprint to match high end sheetfed printing on gloss. I expressed my feelings to no avail it seemed.
The next year we won the very first gold by an open web printer. We keep winning thanks to the great designs we receive from our customers and the commitment to excellence of the folks here at Western Web.
