This DirectSmile personalised sample is for a wedding hire shop.
Would you like to get into variable data but you’re put off by the complexity and expense? Nessan Cleary looks at some of the entry level systems on offer.
The ability to handle variable data remains at the very heart of digital printing and is essential to several applications, such as transactional and transpromo printing. Countless studies have shown that nothing helps a marketing campaign quite like personalised print, preferably with some colour mixed in. These days, print is only one part of the marketing mix, so any variable data solution has to be able to handle mobile and web platforms as well as social media.
But another side of variable data printing (VDP) is the ability to centralise document printing. This can include anything from a corporate mail room to a commercial hybrid mailing solution, which can use economies of scale to offer good rates on both the printing and mailing out of documents and marketing campaigns.
Some of this sort of thing can be handled via a web to print program, and certainly many of these do offer companies the ability to order documents from templates with variable content, while many others have now evolved into marketing campaign tools.
Basic beginnings
Microsoft Word and similar word processors will usually have a basic mail merge facility which is suitable for pulling names and addresses from a list, spreadsheet or database and adding these to a simple layout, such as a letter or an envelope. For more sophisticated page designs, Adobe InDesign also has a basic mail merge facility, though this hasn’t been updated for several versions now. If you want anything more sophisticated, then you’ll need a dedicated VDP program.
For many applications this may be enough, but true variable data is much more sophisticated than this and usually means being able to vary just about any element on a page, including pictures. There are quite a few solutions around and they’re not all pricey and complex high end content management systems. Some, such a Objectif Lune’s Printshop Mail, Kodak’s Darwin, Meadows Publishing Solutions’ DesignMerge Pro or the entry level Desktop version of XMPie, are very affordable and designed for ease of use. These all work as plug-ins for Adobe InDesign (and DesignMerge is also available for QuarkXPress), taking advantage of its sophisticated layout features but adding the ability to set up variable content containers and set up rules for filling from lists or databases.
Most of these include some form of rules-based logic so that the content itself dictates the layout of the document, and the template can accommodate variations from one record to the next, with some having a lot of text, and others hardly any.
Objectif Lune’s PrintShop Mail is one of the most widely used entry level VDP composition tools, with a starting price below £800. It’s fairly simple to use, and has become quite popular. Rather than working as a plug-in to something else, it provides its own layout tool. Users simply drag and drop text and images to make a design and then merge this with a database. It outputs a variety of formats from PPML, VIPP and VPS up to PDF and PDF/VT. It can be used as a central server and the resulting files can be printed on any device, or transferred for remote printing. It’s designed primarily for printing documents out locally, thus reducing postal costs.
The company also sells PlanetPress Suite, a higher end document management system. It can take in documents created in any Windows application and convert these to templates with variable elements. It can also extract information from print streams, databases or XML sources and map these to the templates. The new version 7.5 includes intelligent character recognition in its Capture module, which interprets scanned handwriting and understands how to use information, such as an address or phone number.
Meadows Publishing’s DesignMerge Pro (for either InDesign or XPress) competes with Kodak Darwin and lets designers work with familiar design tools when constructing marketing documents. It’s entirely cross platform and has also been used by other vendors including Canon and Xeikon. It uses a fairly simple menu-driven process to pick out elements that you want to use as variable items. Prices start at around £430 with a basic feature set for PostScript, PDF, Creo VPS and PPML output, with modules including CopyFit (which deals with overflow of variable text by changing factors such as the text size or leading); Rules (which perform specific functions based on conditional logic); and GroupPicture (which effectively allows you to save individual templates as a picture and then add multiple GroupPictures to other designs).
Darwin’s evolution
One of the earliest variable data programs was Darwin, developed initially by Scitex, which itself mutated into Creo. Today Creo is owned by Kodak but still operates as a standalone company. Darwin has an excellent reputation and integrates directly with Creo’s colour servers. It’s a cross platform solution that integrates with Adobe InDesign. It uses rules based logic so no scripting or coding is needed. The Pro version allows users to write their own JavaScript and offers more variable elements, such as barcodes, charts and personalised images created via Photoshop.
XMPie, which is owned by Xerox, offers a number of variable data solutions. These include uDirect, a set of desktop plug-ins for InDesign that exploit all of its considerable layout features such as putting text on a curve and adding transparency effects. There’s also a series of server products, called PersonalEffect, available as a single server or a cluster of multiple servers, which offer cross media, web to print and marketing analytics. There are additional modules for these: uImages, for personalised graphics; uChart, for dynamic charts; uStore, for e-commerce; and uProduce for marketing campaigns.
DirectSmile tends to still be mainly associated with novelty personalised greetings cards, but also develops ‘serious’ VDP, cross media and web to print software. Its entry level VDP Studio costs £5995. It works with InDesign and can be used to personalise images as well as text. It includes Design Editor for creating personalised image sets and character styles. Rule-based logic is used to determine how data is applied to documents without any coding. It also includes its own imposition tool. Transeomedia is the UK distributor.
GMC recently revamped its PrintNet Communications Suite, renaming it as Inspire. PrintNet sold well into the transactional and transpromo markets. Inspire builds on this heritage and also adds the ability to be operated from a private or hosted Cloud server. It can also be integrated with other cloud-based solutions, such as databases or CRM tools. The remake incorporates mobile and web platforms as well as print. It also plays nicely with social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
A new Inspire HybridMail module can take individual documents from a desktop computer, sorting these and then sending them to a central production facility for printing and posting. It can track where each document is, and report on the costs incurred.
PTI, formerly known as Printable Technologies, recently launched FusionPro VDP Suite 8.0. There are three options: VDP Creator, a desktop design and composition tool; VDP Producer, a high speed composition server; and FusionPro Producer, which is a more flexible composition server. It supports HTML output as well as print. It can take designs from different programs including InDesign and Quark. There’s a new list cleansing feature for integration with mailing workflows. It’s sold as Software as a Service. It’s also available through Ricoh.
Infigo Software has developed its own Infigo VDP, which comes in two parts. The core part is Infigo VDP itself, which can recognise variable data fields within a document template and link those to databases. The templates are designed in the second element, Infigo Designer, a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat that can convert existing text in a PDF into an editable field. It adjusts font size to make copy fit, and you can add native Photoshop files.
The VDP program runs on a single PC but the plug-in can be used on any number of computers, Mac or PC. The templates can also be used with Infigo’s web to print program.
Quark has a variable data module for its web to print product, but it’s hardly an entry level solution. It works with QuarkXPress Server so that it can output print-ready PDFs. This does allow for all the design tools that people are familiar with from QuarkXPress. Any element on a page can be designated as a variable element and linked to a database or spreadsheet. It uses intelligent rules to vary the layout according to the size of the content.
Garbage in, garbage out
Finally, it should be noted that the biggest barrier to implementing variable data still remains the quality of the data itself. It’s hard to overstate this, because personalisation only works if it is absolutely accurate, which anybody with a slightly unusual name will appreciate!
The situation has improved considerably over the last decade, as more companies have learned how to collect good data. Supermarkets in particular have used loyalty card schemes to gather data on their customers and then target those customers with special offers and promotions, tailored around their normal shopping patterns.
However, many companies have also learned to use social media to build better databases of potential customers and there are services that will clean up data, so that this shouldn’t be such a problem now.
Contacts
Adobe: www.adobe.co.uk
Creo Darwin: www.creo.com
DirectSmile: www.directsmile.com
DirectSmile UK: www.transeomedia.com
GMC: www.gmc.net
Infigo: www.infigosoftware.com
Meadows: www.meadowsps.com
Objectif Lune: www.objectiflune.com
PTI: www.pti.com
Quark: www.quark.com
XMPie: www.xmpie.com
