Drummond won Best of Show at the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia’s 2026 Print Excellence Competition. The winning piece was the Shutze Awards Book, 19th Annual, which also took Best of Division 4. A second Drummond entry, the Wren 2026 Calendar “A Closer Look,” won Top Gold for Best Use of Color. That is three awards across two pieces, in a competition that judges nothing except how the work was made.
What Best of Show means here
Award language gets loose fast, and this one has a specific mechanism behind it.
The Print Excellence Competition is run by the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia, a state trade association. Entries are grouped into divisions. Within each division the judges pick one piece as Best of Division, described in the association’s own rules as the finest and most skillfully produced within it. Then, from that small set of division winners and nothing else, the judges select a single entry as Best of Show.
So the award is decided in two rounds. The Shutze Awards Book won Division 4 first, and only then went into the pool from which Best of Show was chosen.
Which means the two awards are one piece, not two, and we are not going to inflate the count. Drummond won three awards in 2026: Best of Show and Best of Division 4 for the Shutze Awards Book, and Top Gold for Best Use of Color for the Wren calendar. Drummond entries were also named runners-up in both Best of Division 4 and Best Use of Color.
Why these two pieces
Both winning pieces are the kind of work where there is nowhere to hide.
The Shutze Awards Book is the 19th annual edition of an architecture awards publication. A book like this is judged on the things that compound across every signature: consistent color from the first form to the last, registration that holds through a long run, a binding that opens flat without cracking, and trim that stays square. Nothing about it is rescued in post. Either the press and bindery were controlled the whole way through, or the flaws are stacked on the shelf where anyone can see them.
The Wren 2026 Calendar “A Closer Look” won on color specifically. A calendar is twelve chances to get the same image family right, printed together, then viewed side by side by anyone who hangs it. Judges looking at color want neutral grays that stay neutral, skin and natural tones that read correctly without a cast, shadow detail that has not plugged, and highlights that have not blown out. They also want the twelve pages to agree with each other.
What a print buyer can take from this
Awards are pleasant, and they are a poor reason to buy anything. The useful part is what a competition like this measures, because it is the same list you can use on your own vendors.
When you are evaluating a printer, ask to see a long-run piece rather than a sample sheet. A sample sheet is the best impression that press ever made. A hundred-page book or a twelve-month calendar is an average, and the average is what you are buying.
Then look at the boring things. Pull three copies of the same piece from different parts of the run and compare them to each other, not to the proof. Check whether a solid area is genuinely even across its width. Open a bound piece to the center and see whether it lies flat or fights you. Look at the trim edges under a good light. None of this requires a densitometer or a trained eye, and all of it tells you whether the shop controls its process or gets lucky on the first sheet.
That is also the honest link between a print competition and a procurement decision. A shop that can hold color across a 19th annual awards book can hold it across your quarterly campaign, and that consistency is what our commercial printing services are built to deliver whether the job is an awards book or two hundred thousand pieces of regulated mail.
Where craft meets the rest of the supply chain
Most of what Drummond prints is not an awards book. It is campaign material, retail signage, statements, enrollment kits and direct mail, ordered by distributed teams who need the same brand to look the same in every market.
That work has the same underlying requirement in a harder form. Color has to hold not just across one long run but across substrates, across sites, and across months. A banner printed in March and a mailer printed in September belong to the same brand and are expected to match.
Holding that line at scale is a process question more than a craft question, which is why the ordering and inventory side of it runs through our Wavelength web to print storefront, and the sourcing and logistics side through print management services. A competition measures one piece at its best. The rest of the operation exists so the thousandth piece looks like the first.
Gene Hindman received the Benjamin Franklin Award
At the same ceremony, Gene Hindman received the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia’s Benjamin Franklin Award, given for outstanding contributions in furthering the ideals, aims and accomplishments of the print industry of Georgia.
This one belongs to Gene rather than to Drummond. It is an individual honor for a career, and it is not counted among the three above. Gene spent that career in this industry and served on Drummond’s senior management team before retiring. Congratulations to him, from all of us.
The full results
The complete 2026 Print Excellence Competition results, including every division, every Top Gold category and all the runners-up, are published by the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia in its 2026 Awards Annual at piag.org.
Bring us the job that has nowhere to hide
Drummond runs commercial print, wide format, direct mail and the storefront and sourcing operation around them, from Jacksonville, the Atlanta area and Lake Orion. If you have a piece where color and consistency matter, we would like to quote it.
