Printing Excellence Places Convex In Top Ten

Convex Plastics Pre Press Manager,
Gary Roberts (left) and Printing Manager Gary Dillistone, with the three Gold Medals that placed their company in the "Pride in Print" supreme finals for the third time in four years.

Convex Plastics’ ongoing mastery of extremely challenging flexographic printing jobs has won them three gold medals at the 2006 New Zealand Pride in Print awards and placed them in the supreme finals for the third time in four years.

The privately owned New Zealand company earned its third Supreme Award Finalist title for the dot quality, tonal control and pictorial image reproduction achieved on the striking Whiskas Vita-Bites 75g packaging.

Although the flexographic process was deemed an ideal fit for the job’s short print run, reproducing the rich colour and detail of the design was exacting, says Convex Plastics printing manager, Gary Dillistone. “The fine text and screening reproduction is very difficult to achieve consistently through flexography.”

Another feather in Convex’ cap was printing a job, which was created by Out There Design on behalf of Masterfoods Australia and New Zealand, that would traditionally have been done through the gravure process.

“Because of the small volumes required, the cost to do this work in gravure would be higher,” says Gary, “and flexographic reproduction and quality has now also improved to almost equal gravure.”

Convex collected two other Gold Medals at this year’s Awards, for its reproduction of burrito mix and gravy mix packaging for Pams.

“These jobs created huge challenges with registration,” Gary reveals. “Lots of small images over a large photopolymer plate made it difficult to get every image to fit. A normal job would have 16 mounting microdots on each stepped image. These required 64 and were the first time we’ve experienced this.”

According to Gary Dillistone, Convex Plastics is especially pleased with the industry recognitions for their printing as all their winning entries were selections of their everyday work and not specifically produced for the competition.  He says, “Everything we enter is done as a production run so that makes our work consistently high in quality.”

In 2002, Convex Plastics won a Pride in Print gold medal and made it into the supreme finals with a promotional banner they manufactured and printed for Arnotts Australia. The continuous image promoting the Arnotts Snack Right line impressed the Pride in Print judges with its almost invisible bulk joins and excellent black vignette.

Convex Plastics also won a Pride in Print gold medal and a supreme finalist title in 2002 for a sample of lawn fertiliser packaging they manufactured and printed for Adelaide-based, Manutec pty Ltd. The same packaging also scored them a silver medal at the Australian Flexographic Technical Association (AFTA) awards in 2001.

Convex Plastics Printing Manager, Gary Dillistone, believes the awards demonstrate Convex Plastics’ continuing commitment to printing excellence.

He says, “In my opinion, Convex Plastics is one of the leading companies in Australasia in terms of quality of print in both production and technical expertise. We also have the distinct advantage of being one of only a handful of companies able to provide a consistently high quality of printing on a wide range of plastic printing materials.”