Urbis issue #54 walked away with the Supreme Award at the Pride in Print Awards 2011.

The Pride in Print Awards celebrate quality printing, which as well as the technical stuff of ink on page, also includes concerns like cover design, difficulty of insets or gatefolds and appropriateness of the style and advertisements.

Urbis taking out not only the Publishing category, and also being the Process winner for sheetfed offset printing, as well as the huge overall Supreme Award is a boon not just for our patient and talented printers, GEON, but the team effort involved made this possible from Art Director Andre Kini who oversaw the entire design, to the other designers in studio who worked on the cover, the editorial team, and the sales team who worked closely with Audi to create a difficult but spectacular 8 page fold-out section attached to the inside of the cover.

Judges comments: “Demanding design features throughout produced to perfection. This job raises the bar in New Zealand printing.”

Judge Damian Fleming said the magazine caught the attention of everyone who looked at it.

“There are things about this book which are really cool. The front cover folds out to make eight pages and the folds have to be exact to make it work. It is a pretty outrageous thing to attempt and get right. The attention to detail on the cover includes a matched image where the cover finishes just short of the fore-edge. The result is seamless.

“Inside, there is a tip-in insert which has been printed to match the colour and position of the image on the page beneath. It was printed on different stock, on a different day from the magazine, yet it matches perfectly. This wasn’t some simple glossy advert, but a perforated and complete image match up.

“Then there was the binding which has been difficult in its own right, and that has succeeded.

All of us at Urbis are very proud of this win. In a market that may compell some titles to reduce the quality of their printing, we feel that the beautiful, glossy, international-quality printing of Urbis is what differentiates us, and makes our magazine a truly unique object.

Urbis is printed by GEON Group in Auckland.

More details here.