Images Magazine Digital Edition August 2018

www.images-magazine.com 20 images AUGUST 2018 wine retailer and your database shows that your customer is either a red wine or a white wine fan, you can adjust the entire imagery and selection of special offers in your next direct mailing according to each individual’s taste. In garment decoration, obvious VDP applications would be jerseys for a football team with individual names and player numbers on the back. You could print individualised staff shirts – with letters in different colours for female and male employees, perhaps, or for different departments. Alternatively, why not develop a clever gift shirt that contains an individual’s birth date and the coordinates of their birthplace in an appealing design? Another idea might be to create a limited edition of a special design – for example, for a niche fashion brand – where every printed garment includes a count number like, ‚#34 out of 100 ever made‘. Margin- driving ideas are endless in VDP. Such applications may sound simple M any ‘analogue‘ printers will remember the times when adding serial numbers or other variable information to printed products was a complicated task. Usually you would add an additional step to your workflow and involve a dedicated numbering machine or numbering head. This is one area where digital printing has a clear advantage – easy variable data printing (VDP). You will probably be familiar with the concept of VDP from the mail merge function in Microsoft Word: you work up a standard letter with mostly static content and then include placeholders for certain variable data, such as the name and address for each individual to whom you will be sending the letter. When the letter is printed, the production software (Word, in this case) connects to a database (in this case, most likely Excel), fetches a recipient’s name and address, and includes it with the print data where the placeholder used to be. It has been proven that clever usage of VDP can improve response rates in direct marketing by several hundred percent. VDP is not limited to text replacements by the way: if you are a Oliver Luedtke of Kornit discusses the advantages of variable data printing and the workflow options available to those using digital printers Variable data printing in principle, but having a proper VDP workflow in place is likely to make a huge difference in time and labour cost compared with creating each print file manually in Photoshop. In fact, it might be the deciding factor as to whether you can turn such jobs around profitably or not. The old-fashioned workflow, where you print the static content first and introduce a second print run for the variable data using a second system or technology, is the simplest but most limited approach to VDP. However, it’s totally common in garment decoration – you could, for example, print a number of garments on your screen carousel first and use a direct-to- garment printer later to add the variable content. This will involve you having to master a few additional challenges such as proper registration between the different parts of the content. Hence, the ‘gold standard’ of a VDP workflow means producing both the Oliver Luedtke This is one area where digital printing has a clear advantage KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES