Daena allows partial or complete automation of artwork creation
West Yorkshire-based software developer Daena has used IPEX 2017 as the platform to introduce a suite of tools and services to automate the production of complex artwork for packaging using Adobe Illustrator.
Daena’s three-stage approach involves “insight” pre-sales consultancy in which the customer’s production processes are investigated; this is followed by an “accelerate” phase in which process automation is designed using a scripting language developed specifically for the purpose by Daena. The “complete” implementation then uses the rules and processes defined earlier to drive highly flexible automated artwork production for sectors such as food or pharmaceuticals packaging, including the correct selection and placement of regulatory information and brand elements, application of position-based text formatting rules such as “make the third word in the line bold”, together with cutting data where appropriate.
Managing director Jason Ridyard explained to Digital Printer, ‘We’re not prescriptive – or restrictive – about data input formats. If it’s got structure, we’ll use it’. This extends to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets as well as common database export formats. The Daena desktop client extracts the data and implements the rules to meet regulatory requirements and brand guidelines by manipulating Adobe Illustrator artwork to produce a fully editable file.
‘The finished artwork is still editable; we can get Illustrator to do anything that a person [operating it] can do,’ said Mr Ridyard. He claimed that the Daena solution can improve operator processes by 50 to 70%, giving operators ‘more time to perfect the brand’. He also stated that it is cheaper or more flexible than a range of alternatives that are sector-specific, less automated or unable to produce editable artwork files.
