Church of Scientology Wins Best of Show

To say that Jud Posner was stunned when he learned that his in-plant’s booklet won the In-Print 2016 Best of Show award for offset printing is an understatement.

“We were very surprised. Very happy,” says Posner, pressroom manager at the Church of Scientology International Dissemination and Distribution Center.

The Church of Scientology International's Jud Posner, second from right, receives the Best of Show award during the IPMA conference.

When he stepped to the stage in Denver last month to claim the Best of Show trophy, it was just moments after watching a video (see below) showing the judges selecting his in-plant’s booklet over entries produced by two previous Best of Show winners, Brigham Young University and the University of Oklahoma, whose catalogs came in second and third respectively. He was very humbled.

“Everybody worked hard on this piece and everything we do,” he says. “So we’re all very proud.”
This success story is especially remarkable considering how far the 56-employee in-plant’s quality has come since it first entered the In-Print contest years ago. Only seven years old, the Dissemination and Distribution Center opened in 2009 using equipment operators with no previous printing experience. All were dedicated church members who were trained at Cal Poly and Rochester Institute of Technology. They work out of an immaculate 185,000 sq. ft. facility in Commerce, Calif.

The winning booklet from the Church of Scientology International.

After winning not a single award in its contest debut several years ago, the in-plant contacted IPG and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association, the contest’s organizers, to ask what it had done wrong. The judges explained that while the print quality of those pieces was excellent, the crossovers and rules were all slightly off.

The in-plant took that knowledge to heart. On its winning booklet this year, every page has a crossover and each one of them lines up perfectly. The in-plant changed its processes to ensure this and now focuses specifically on getting crossovers right in each and every piece produced.

Making a New Church Shine
The winning booklet is a 48-page plus cover piece highlighting a new church in Basel, Switzerland. It features sharp, colorful photos of all of the features and services offered by this church. The in-plant printed 5,000 booklets in four languages: English, German, Italian and French. They were presented to parishioners, government officials and other dignitaries for the church’s grand opening.

“We wanted it to showcase the building as beautiful,” remarks Posner. “A lot of care goes into these brochures when a church opens to make them look as good as they do, so that it does the building as much justice in print as it can.”

The photos, works of art by themselves, were taken by Jimmy Bush, an in-house photographer with Scientology Media Productions. Because he couldn’t take pictures until the building was finished, the in-plant found itself with a very tight schedule; it had just eight hours to print, bind and package the job for shipment to Switzerland for the grand opening.

The design team at Scientology Media Productions used Bush’s photos to design the winning booklet in its offices inside the church’s new media complex in Hollywood, a digital media production center for TV, internet and magazines. Posner gives them lots of credit for their work on the piece.

“We are definitely fortunate to have such a great design team and photographers,” he lauds.

The designers output proofs on an Epson Stylus Pro 9890, which is calibrated to the in-plant’s presses. The shop is fully G7 certified. Proofs were sent along with press-ready PDF files to the Dissemination and Distribution Center, about 12 miles away. Then the eight-hour timer started ticking.

First Paul Devlin-Drye, head of prepress, checked, preflighted and imposed the files. He made plates on one of the shop’s two Agfa Avantra platesetters and sent them to the pressroom.

From there, Bo Bengtsson and Tom Welch loaded the plates onto the five-color plus coater Heidelberg XL105 press and started printing, making sure the side guides and gripper edges lined up exactly right. Pages were printed on NewPage Sterling 80-lb. dull, with the cover printed on Sterling 80-lb. cover stock.

Special care was taken with the cover. The photo was enhanced using a blue metallic ink, and a dull aqueous coating was laid down. Then the cover was put on a Sakurai UV screen press, operated by Igor Kostenko, who applied a spot gloss to the photo as well as a series of fine horizontal lines across the cover to give it a linen feel. The result is very impressive.

Getting the numerous crossovers to line up so perfectly started with a process change worked out by Posner and the prepress and bindery managers. Rather than printing 16-page signatures, they switched to printing two eight-page signatures, folding them as double parallel and then slitting and cutting them on the Stahl folder.

“We get no gusseting; no variation on the fold,” Posner notes. “That’s something we spent a lot of time working on.

“One thing we found is if we don’t trim off the gripper edge we get much better quality on the folder,” he adds. “We don’t lose our guiding edges from the press.”

After Kevin Poggio folded the pages, Jarratt Smith stitched them on a Muller Martini Primera saddle stitcher. From there, the booklets were ready to ship overseas, where they impressed parishioners as much as they impressed the In-Print judges.

“That piece needed to showcase the beauty of that new church,” Posner says.

The in-plant’s Best of Show award is testimony to the shop’s success at doing this.