Newspaper printing honours were shared between New Zealand’s two major players at Friday’s NZ Pride In Print Awards, but it was an elaborate multi-process wedding invitation that stunned judges.

NZME’s Ellerslie Print won the newspapers category for its Weekend Sun issue 1233; Stuff Petone’s Waikato Times the coldset process category for Your Weekend dated October 12, 2024.

The 2025 Pride In Print Awards were presented at the Cordis Auckland on Friday, with print supervisor and flexo printer Brad Smith from Transcontinental Packaging NZ named the BJ Ball apprentice of the year during the evening.

Supreme winner was a suite of invitation items produced by Studio Q/ Laserfoil for the wedding of Kaya and Brian.

The standout wedding invitation suite was for client Michaela McBride Calligraphy, who is gaining a substantial international reputation. With several of the beautifully-produced invites for overseas customers to consider, judged picked one for a print buyer in New Jersey, noting the “huge technical difficulty” in achieving such quality across digital and letterpress printing, light debossing, diecuts, foiling, hand-stitching “and much more”. Customised detail additionally involved the incorporation of actual vintage American stamps, a personalised seal, a precisely-bowed ribbon and hand-mixed colours on bespoke stock.

Avondale-based Studio Q/Laserfoil’s Dave and Liesl Trotter, and Tim Morris also mentioned the “continuing and evolving relevance of the platen letterpress”, as well as the crucial benefits of in-house capability, in which “if it’s not perfect, you change it a bit and go back and do another print, until it is”.

Process winners were: sheetfed offset – Brebner Print; inkjet – Caxton; screen – Colour Evolution; digital – Eamar Innovative Solutions; gravure – Gravure Packaging; flexographic –Sealed Air Hamilton; coldset – Stuff Petone; heatset –Webstar; and letterpress – Windmill Press.

Other Apprentice of the Year finalists were Eligh Arthur (Gravure Packaging), Toese Fauatea (Opal Packaging NZ, Cartons), Tayla Jones (Logan Print), Jessia Moore (Imagine If Creative Studios) and Faamao (Paul) Müller (Wedderburn New Zealand), described by PrintNZ chief executive Ruth Cobb as “an outstanding batch of graduates”…. also the reason for choosing six finalists instead of the usual five.

Sustainability business awards were also presented during the evening.

More information from Ruth Cobb, ruth.cobb@printnz.co.nz