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Variable Data Printing is a simple but elegant solution to personalise prints for their intended recipients. It harnesses the strengths of digital printing to generate hyper-personalised print jobs using mail merge printing software.
To fully exploit the advantages of VDP / variable printing, we first need to understand the gap created by traditional printing techniques. Offset and screen printing techniques have been around for centuries. And they are absolutely fantastic when it comes to delivering mass quantities of the same print image, like a flyer or leaflet. But the screen and offset printers suffer from one major drawback. They cannot generate single or individually unique images/prints. You cannot deploy an offset printer to print out just one letter for a single individual recipient. You have to do a variable digital printing on this letter on a laser or inkjet printer.
There exist certain situations where you need variable data printing services to print vast quantities of prints having the same layout/design. Yet each of these prints differs from the previous one because of the data it contains. Here is an example to understand this situation –
Imagine a blank school mark sheet. The mark sheet template will have static information like the name of the school at the top of the page, the principal’s signature at the bottom and rows or columns containing the name of subjects the students are being tested for. While this mark sheet template remains the same for all the students, the data within changes from print to print. Each mark sheet will bear a different student’s name, his individual marks and grades. This needs VDP printing, also known as the variable data printing services.
So in a manner of speaking, we have undertaken a mass variable printing job of hundreds if not thousands of similarly laid out mark sheets. The artwork for these prints remains the same across all recipients. But the content for each of these prints is going to change on a person to person basis. This process of merging discrete user data with a standard design template, to generate hyper-personalised prints in vast quantities, is known as Variable Data Printing or VDP for short.
Think of the following printing applications…
In each of the above cases, you will find two things:
This is when you will need to find variable data printing companies that do VDP printing.
To do a VDP job, a client needs to provide two things to the variable data printing companies…
With the above two files in hand, the print service bureau will map the individual fields in the database to the relevant locations on the design template. For example, in our mark sheet job, marks for history have to show up in the history column. Student names have to show up at the top, grades have to be reproduced at a particular location at the bottom and so on. Once this field mapping is done, we upload both the excel database file and the base design template to the digital printer.
The machine then merges these two files to create a single file with multiple pages. For example, if we have a hundred students’ names and marks in our data file, the digital printer will create one file with a hundred different pages. Each of these pages will have the same basic layout but different names and marks.
All we now have to do is hit the ‘print’ button and the digital printer starts outputting a highly personalised job.
Digital print providers can create huge value addition for their clients by leveraging two features of their machines – Mass production + Individual personalisation. Moreover, this technology is machine-independent. It can be deployed on both, a sheet-fed laser printer and wide-format inkjet printer. This means that VDP can be extended to small-sized certificates and even large-sized posters. The benefits of VDP include…
Digital printing machines are highly technical pieces of equipment. But many print vendors keep running these machines on their default settings to generate standardized output. On the other hand, some of us also tweak these settings to generate significant value addition. VDP is one such example of extending a machine’s originally intended capabilities. At Orchid Digitals, apart from basic printing, our machines also include value add-ons like shape cutting, raised effect printing, white layer printing, reverse printing, etc.
Every good digital print service provider has certain ideas or ‘tricks’ up his sleeve to speed up a job, increase print quality or give the print a different form altogether. So do share your tips or thoughts in the comments section below, for I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say. Cheers.
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