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Idea Custom Solutions brand won a Golden Needle Award for the design of the year, artistic, corporate, from Stitches Magazine. The design was based on Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum."

Chicago, November 11, 2013 — Affinity Express Inc., the leading white label creative and marketing services partner for promotional products, local media, retail, marketing services, ad network, ad tech and other companies that serve SMBs, announced that the company’s Idea Custom Solutions brand won a Golden Needle Award for the design of the year, artistic, corporate, from Stitches Magazine. The design was based on Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum.”

The Idea Custom Solutions team creates embroidered holiday cards every year for clients. “The annual holiday greeting is developed to demonstrate our creative and technical capabilities. The most rewarding part of this project was the extremely positive feedback we received from clients,” said Team Leader Firoj Mujawwar.

The design features 24 colors and is composed of 64,519 stitches in Madeira polyneon thread. It was embroidered with a Barudan machine. The most challenging aspect of the project was to generate the various types of stitches and achieve similar gradients without losing the small details of the painting in embroidery. As a result, the team created multiple versions of the file and samples with various stitch patterns and gradients before finalizing the design.

The card was created by a team including Firoj Mujawwar, digitizer and team leader; Pravin Bhosale, quality checker; and Santosh Thakur, sampler.

According to Vice President of Marketing Kelly Glass, “We look for works of art that evoke the season without using standard holiday imagery. The colors in Van Gogh’s scene suggest the good cheer we want to share with our clients.”

About Idea Custom Solutions
Idea Custom Solutions is the premier global provider of high-volume graphic production and business services to promotional products suppliers, distributors and decorators, and is an AffinityX brand. AffinityX is the leading white label creative and marketing services partner for companies that serve SMBs. We help our clients drive new revenue by offering everything their customers need, from physical to digital – logos, print ads, websites, online ad campaigns, and much more. We deliver world-class design and turnarounds in as little as four hours, all at a price SMBs can afford. The world’s best SMB-focused companies depend on our technology, processes and insights to secure their success. Idea Custom Solutions and AffinityX are trademarks and sole property of Affinity Express, Inc.

For more information on Idea Custom Solutions, visit: www.ideacustom.com. For more information about AffinityX, please visit www.affinityX.com.

About the Golden Needle Awards
For the past six years, the Stitches Golden Needle Awards have recognized excellence in embroidery and digitizing. The embroidery awards were selected by members of the magazine’s advisory board: Ginny Fineberg, owner of Wildwood Crest, NJ-Based Sandpiper Embroidery; Geri Finio, owner of Ann Arundel County, MD’s Studio 187; and Andy Shuman, general manager of Topton, PA-based Rockland Embroidery. The digitizing awards were selected by Jay Fishman, president of Beachwood, OH’s Wicked Stich of the East; Bonnie Landsberger, owner of Moonlight Design in Cannon Falls, MN; and Erich Campbell, digitizer and e-commerce manager at Albuquerque, NM-based Black Duck Inc. Each judge rated the designs on a scale of one to ten, assessing them on overall sewing quality, including thread breaks; proper use of pathing, trims and color changes; and overall artistic merit, including design elements and aesthetic appeal. All judging was blind.

Kelly Glass, Idea Custom Solutions 847-930-3205 or kellyg@ideacustom.com