Price increase for Lester Hall Prints

The last couple of years has seen artist Lester Hall "back catalogue" a large proportion of images previously available as prints.  The effect of this has been that once a retailer such as New Zealand Fine Prints sold out of stock of a print Lester would not replace stock, essentially this print became sold out/deleted and will now only be available on the re-sale market (eg through secondary sales at auction). 

In an announcement taking effect today (Monday 8th April) Lester has raised prices of his current range of prints to $495.

Lester Hall "Queen of the Fern" $495

We will have his prints listed at what is now the old price in our current printed mail order fine art print catalogue for a while yet but pricing has been updated online in the Lester Hall collection at prints.co.nz

Lester is busy working on a new series of prints, the first release is Queen of the Fern, a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II wearing a jewel encrusted silver fern brooch. 

Posters from 1980s NZ

Posters were important when I was growing up. I hope they still are for today's kids.  We are gradually building up a good  collection of educational (eg science) posters over in our kids collection. There wasn't the large supply of commercial artwork promoting brands like today, but there were other rich sources for cheap posters for kids in pre-Rogernomics NZ.

Conservation New Zealand (Organization). Hall, Ken, 

fl 1980s :Conservation Week; 

Nature's place in town, 1-9 August 1981 

Ref: Eph-D-ENVIRONMENT-1981-02. Alexander Turnbull Library,

 Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22874794

Talented kiwi designers found themselves a niche churning out resources for the government departments that ran so many parts of the economy back in those days. 

In Nelson we had the entomology division of the DSIR (the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) based at the Cawthron Insitute and both they and the Forest Service had many posters available for education use.  You would just go to the front counter and ask what they had.   

There were posters for Conservation Week each year, including the classic 1981 "Nature's Place in Town" pictured at left.

There were also updates to 1930s era  vintage posters for the photographic age that show the enduring themes from how NZ was marketed abroad.  See the Maurice Poulton design "New Zealand: For the World's Best Sport" modernised to the photographically based "New Zealand: The Angler's Paradise" but retaining the same message and content.

Pictorial Publications Ltd :New Zealand,
"the angler's paradise".
Ref: Eph-E-TOURISM-1960s-02.
Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23088078

1930s Vintage NZ Tourism Poster

Posters for women's lib (Girls can do Anything!) adorned the classroom, but not this blog as Crown copyright holds sway over the image still!

For older teens the arthouse cinema at the Bishop Suter Art Gallery was a happy hunting ground for movie posters, and we haunted the local record shops for music posters. These were reproductions of touring posters and posters promoting the band.

Trending New Zealand art in 2018

Today's post is a short video of New Zealand's top selling art prints/fine art posters in 2018.  Counting down the most popular prints based on sales data from New Zealand's largest art print store.

Video made by 11 year old Lucy, wondering if she will be following in the steps of her parents (and grandparents) to be part of the New Zealand Fine Prints company story around 2030 or so? 

Xmas Mailing Dates NZ 2018

From early November until Christmas is the busiest time of the year sales wise for NZ Fine Prints. Art prints are perennially popular Xmas gifts and making sure we deliver on time for Xmas around the world and throughout NZ has been something we have been doing for 52 years!!

Christmas on a Tuesday is a bit awkward delivery wise.  This year our cut off date for NZ wide delivery by Xmas day is way back on Friday 21st December - so we'll be promoting the gift certificates over that last weekend (Christchurch customers can come and pick up right through to Xmas Eve though).

Official mailing dates are below, these apply to our standard delivery service. There may be other delivery options available outside of our standard service/pricing so if you think you are running out of time please call us on 0800 800 278 in the lead up to Xmas, we may be able to work something out for you.

NZ Fine Prints Christmas Mailing Dates for 2018 are as follows:

Delivery worldwide at our standard rate of just $NZ15 (for any number of prints):

Australia

Please order your gifts by Wednesday 5th December 2018

UK & Europe, East Asia, North America & South Pacific

Please order your gifts by Monday 3 December 2018

Rest of World

Order Xmas gifts by Friday 30th November 2018

Xmas Delivery to NZ Addresses

Standard Delivery for $NZ6 (for any number of prints)

We need to have your orders for prints being delivered as gifts for Xmas by 3pm Thursday 20th December 2018

Deadline for next day courier delivery via CourierPost with guaranteed delivery for Xmas day is 3pm Friday 21st December 2018

Framed Prints - please order 10 working days before these mailing dates to ensure we can deliver by Christmas.

Gift Vouchers

NZ Prints also deliver gift vouchers by mail to NZ addresses if ordered by 21st December - and email gift vouchers are even being purchased on Xmas day itself and delivered instantly around the world. Now that is last second Christmas shopping!

Shipping & Delivery Updates

As we get closer to Xmas we will update any delays or known issues with Xmas delivery on our shipping & delivery page.

Store re-design for New Zealand Fine Prints

Last day for our old storefront design

After two years of customer research, user testing, design & development the fifth generation of New Zealand Fine Prints' online store went live on Thursday August 30.  So many new ways to find art - searching by shape and size were two of our most asked for features and we are delighted to be rolling these filters out alongside hundreds of other changes.

The design of some of our store elements go back to 1999, nearly twenty years which is an eternity in online shopping and user experience terms.  Prints.co.nz has evolved through 5 major re-designs and this was one of the biggest.

Aside from so many new paths to discover art we have re-built the store from the ground up on a responsive platform which will improve customers shopping experience on mobile and tablet devices.  Behind the scenes there are extra layers of security to protect our customers privacy too. 

The launch has gone relatively smoothly apart from some broken image links for recently added products which took a few hours to fix.  We are now in the post launch QA (Quality Assurance) design testing phase, over one hundred outstanding issues with styling yet to be addressed. 

With orders coming through and shipping out we know we haven't broken the site though and it's so exciting to be looking forward to rolling out all the new features over the next few months.