Origins of the G7 Process

In 2004, the IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) GRACoL® (General
Requirements and Applications for Commercial Offset Lithography) Committee,
published a characterization data set, based on a sheetfed offset press run, that the
committee believed represented good commercial printing on a #1 coated sheet for
commercial printing. Almost immediately this data set was deemed to be unacceptable
by the printing community. When the GRACoL Committee went back to the drawing
board its next attempt to define specifications for commercial printing took a radical
turn that even today has printers and the print-buying community abuzz.

Their development of a radical, new proofing and printing methodology grew out of a
demand from the print-buying community for a closer “visual” match between proofs
and the final printed product. The effort was guided, in part, by one of its co-chairs,
Anthony Bellacicco, then Director of Prepress Services, Foote Cone & Belding, New York.
Anthony strongly advocated developing not only new aims for commercial printing, but
a new process that would assure him of a closer visual match between the vision of the
creative and the finished product on press.

The GRACoL team was rounded out by its chair, Don Hutcheson, a leading color
management consultant and Gerry Gerlach, a printer and former scanner and digital
photographer. This team lead a series of 19 research press runs to refine the G7™
Proof-to-Print Process and to develop a characterization data set for commercial
printing on a #1 coated sheet that will be published as GRACoL 7.