Top Design Contest--Form/Label Combinations

Platinum Award: Form/Label Combinations.

Printing for Children.

When the Educational Division of the Chiba Prefecture Office in Chiba-shi, Chiba-ken, Japan, decided to initiate an educational traffic safety program aimed at children, of course, everyone was for it. But finding just the right printer—that was a different story.

The client had strong ideas about how the flier should look. In fact, it even had a set of illustrations depicting, more or less, the exact look they wanted.

After shopping the idea around to several printing companies, the Educational Division decided that Taiyo-do Printing, Chiba-ken, had the best grasp of its vision and awarded the contract to them. The project was given to employee Koji Higurashi, who designed the flier.

"There was a request by the client that the flier should be something that strongly appealed to children," recalled Shuichi Higurashi, president of Taiyodo Printing.

"Because more and more children are becoming unfamiliar with [traffic signs]," he added, "it needed to be something the children would stop and take a look at."

Shuichi Higurashi noted that his company accomplished this goal by working hard to recreate the client's illustrations. They then threw in every available business form printing and off-line processing gimmick—including die-cutting sections to create strips of peel-off stickers and perfing and laminating wallet-size sections for listing emergency phone numbers and information.

Shuichi Higurashi noted that, in order to win the job, Taiyodo Printing spent hours thinking of ways to persuade the client of the effectiveness of its method of sheet-fed printing. They wanted to make sure that the Educational Division recognized the full value of form printing.

"We overcame the difficulty by taking the form of a problem-solving game with the use of stickers," explained Shuichi Higurashi. "We made an effort to make the exercise fun. Both the client and the children loved it."

• Manufacturer: Taiyodo Printing, Chiba-shi, Chiba-ken, Japan.

• Press: Miyakoshi.

• Paper: Mitsubishi.