The South Pacific Brewery annual report, which Spot printed entirely on beer coasters, gave GPY&R a Silver Lion at the world’s leading advertising awards ceremony, Australia’s only win in the ‘Design” category.

The report also received an award at the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) Awards held last month.

Spot managing director Simon Carmody told ProPrint his production team initially “freaked out” when told they would have to find a way to print a 40pp report on beer coasters.

“Before we put ink on paper, it took two months of planning,” he revealed.

He said they key demand from the client was that they wanted as much colour as possible. The design was handled jointly by Spot and GPY&R, before Spot had to go through a rigorous testing process to figure out how to produce the report.

“We had to do test prints to get the right colour removal and ink weight. We also ran proofs through our digital machine to show the client the effect, so we were making dummies up on our Xerox 700,” Carmody said.

Carmody said that, once all the preparations and testing were completed, “the printing itself was quite easy.” The company printed the job on its two five-colour Ryobi 750 presses.

Eventually, the ‘pages’ were hand-stitched and wrapped with a cover that required a “chunky wire” to penetrate the thick coasters.

Carmody said he was hopeful of further awards success at this weekend’s Queensland PICAs.

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