Mark Andy salutes winning students

As part of its program to educate the printers of tomorrow, Mark Andy Europe launched a competition for students earlier this year. The aim was to encourage young people from all over Europe who are studying any subject related to art, design or printing to submit designs for labels to be printed at the Hybrid Forum Open House at Mark Andy’s European HQ in Warsaw.

L-R: Mark Andy’s managing director Europe, Tom Cavalco, with winning students Olena Onyshchuk and Lydia Haussmann, and Mark Andy’s CEO, Kevin Wilken, at the recent ‘Power of Hybrid Forum’ in Warsaw

The students could choose to design a label that would be printed flexo or digital. After careful scrutiny of all the entries, the judges decided there should be two winners. The prize was to have their label printed and displayed at the three-day event, where it was seen by more than 300 label converters. The print samples, one for a coffee bag and the other for a muesli bag, was also displayed on the Mark Andy stand at Labelexpo Americas in Chicago.

The two winners were Olena Onyshchuk, from Kiev, Ukraine, who is a big fan of animation and hopes to pursue this in her studies, and Lydia Haussmann from Stuttgart, Germany, where she is attending one of Europe’s most famous print universities and studying package printing. Both girls were warmly applauded by the visitors to the open house, and in the evening were taken out to dinner in Warsaw by the Mark Andy team.

Lena Chmielewska, Mark Andy’s head of marketing for Europe and the organizer of the competition, said: ‘We were very pleased with the first-year entries and I add my congratulations to the two winners. We clearly have some promising talent coming through the student ranks in Europe, and these will be the people to take our industry forward. We are intending to develop the competition concept next year and encourage as many students as possible to take part.’