Ben Franklin Ball and Gallery of Superb Printing

This year, the 56th Annual Ben Franklin Ball and Gallery of Superb Printing was held down at , a change from its usual location up in Akron (we can all thank , for that!). It took place this past Saturday.

The ball is hosted by the Northeast Ohio Craftsmen Club (NEOCC), and it's mainly an award ceremony for print and design companies in the club who have submitted their work. These companies send in pieces that they think are their best works of the year, and the pieces are judged. This year, the judges were Marty Timmermin of Myers Industries, Michael Gorfido of Digital Color International and Anthony Tupta of Hewlett Packard. They judged from several categories in both print and design, and they picked what they thought was the best of each. They gave the pieces either a gold award, silver award or the bronze award.

Then from the many pieces that received a gold, the judges picked the 10 best for the judges gallery, and one for Best of Show for Print and Best of Show Creative. There are also the awards for Person of the Year (voted on by previous presidents), and this year there was an award for the Distinguished Service in Education. Of the 13 companies that entered, each and every one of them won some sort of award.

Here's what everybody won in Best of Show, the Person of the Year and the Distinguished Service in Education awards:

Best of Show for Print went to The Hennegan Company for the Stuart Weitzman Fall 2011 Trend Catalog

Best of Show Creative went to Trailer Trash Design for the 2011 Christmas Card

The Distinguished Service in Education award went to Dennis Rak who is the Memorial Scholarship Chairman

Person of the Year went to Janet Von Gunten from Xpedx.

One of the companies that we are most proud to say won an award was GRIN: Golden Retreivers In Need. GRIN is a non-profit rescue group that serves Northeast Ohio and other surrounding areas that don't have golden retreiver rescues. The group is an all-around good group, and we were happy to say they took home a silver award for their 2011 calander. (For more information on GRIN, you can visit their website here.)

Along with the ceremony, we also have a silent auction which benefits the Memorial Scholarship Fund for graduating high school seniors. Items are generously donated by various companies, and they are bid on. The person with the highest bid gets the item, and the scholarship gets 100 percent of the proceeds. This year we managed to wrangle up a little more than $300! We also have the 50/50 raffle which is split in two. The first half goes to the winner (which was me this year! Hayoh!), and the other half is again split in two: The club keeps one half and the other half is again donated to the scholarship fund. 

The event went over really, really well. Donna Rasicci was an awesome help in planning the event. The food was great (I got the beef ... and that practically melted in my mouth), the drinks were equally as great (the bartender, Steve, remembered everyone's name and what they had to drink), and the Lodge looked gorgeous. Everything went off witout a hitch, and we couldn't have done it without Joe Rozsa, who planned the whole event, and of course, Donna and the staff at . If you're thinking about having some sort of event there, our advice is to do it.