Pulp+Wire firm wins three national awards for design

Pulp+Wire, a Portland design and marketing firm, announced it won three national design awards in Graphic Design USA’s 2012 American Package Design Awards, for its work for Adventurous Joe Coffee, Mad Gab’s and Pleasant River Soap Co.

The competition judges work from graphic design firms, advertising agencies, in-house corporate and institutional designers, publishers and other media. The competition attracts more than 10,000 entries each year.

Pulp+Wire received top packaging honors for the newly launched Adventurous Joe Coffee. It designed the graphics so they could be changed easily to spotlight user-generated adventure scenes shot and submitted by Adventurous Joe drinkers. The labels will rotate regularly.

Pulp+Wire was selected as one of four agencies nationwide to participate in Package Design magazine’s Makeover Challenge, which pits four firms against each other in a packaging competition for a client.

Package Design’s annual competition selects four design firms and challenges them to create a new look for a real client. This year, Klara’s Gourmet Cookies, a fast-growing cookie product, needed a design overhaul to help with the next phase of its growth. The packaging overhaul is due June 21, and the winner will be announced this fall.

Maine summer camps add $332 million to economy

Summer camps in Maine have a total economic impact of $332 million, including payroll, benefits and goods and services bought by the camps, according to a study by Planning Decisions Inc.

The report, commissioned by the American Camp Association, showed that the economic impact of the summer camp industry was about 90 percent as large as Maine’s boatbuilding sector, about 40 percent as big as the value of annual lobster landings and about 34 percent as large as the state’s commercial logging sector.

Maine’s 330 day and residential camps have 500 full-time employees and 10,500 seasonal workers. The combination of their annual operations and capital spending, plus the spending of more than 45,000 out-of-state vistors, accounted for more than $171 million for the Maine economy, the study found.

Average price of gasoline down to $3.55 per gallon

The average retail price of a gallon of gas in Maine has plummeted another eight cents to $3.55.

Price-monitoring site MaineGasPrices.com reported Monday that prices in Maine have now fallen nearly a quarter in the past month and are a penny below the national average.

— From staff and news services