White Space Management
By their nature, TransPromo applications have several unique requirements. One key requirement is in managing the placement of form content. White space management, also known as white space marketing, is a term used to refer to application design techniques that maximise the placement and effectiveness of content on a form.
While many VDP software vendors are riding on the TransPromo wave and claim their software can create TransPromo applications, few can actually deliver on this promise. Generally speaking, VDP products that use page layout software (e.g. QuarkXPress or InDesign), or PDF form-based templates for composition can’t offer the tight level of control required to manage white space on the form. Whereas solutions that use their own composition engine, including GMC PrintNet, Exstream Dialog, EMC xPression and Group 1 DOC1 can offer white space management features, as they are aware of the exact location of content on the form.
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Posted on Friday, 4 July 2008 at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
TransPromo Questions
I attended the ADMA Forum in Sydney last week and was interested to see that one conference track included a session on TransPromo. In light of the current TransPromo hype, I decided to go along for the ride and see if I could pick up anything new. Grant Stewart from Vectis presented the session. Alongside some local case studies, Grant answered some “interesting questions” on transactional-promotional mail which are worth noting. While these questions may seem obvious to many, they’re helpful for those who are considering TransPromo applications and want to understand what value they can provide.
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Posted on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Scriptura
I spent some time looking at Scriptura yesterday. Scriptura is a VDP solution from Inventive Designers, a Belgium-based company. If you haven’t heard of Scriptura before, you’ll be forgiven. They’ve kept a fairly low profile to-date, in fact I’ve only recently come across them. Despite their quiet presence, they have a growing number of distributors across Europe, US, Canada and Australia. Their Scriptura solution comprises of two core products; Scriptura Designer and Scriptura Server. Both products are Java-based which means they can run in a cross-platform environment through the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). To my knowledge, this is the only VDP solution that runs exclusively in a Java environment. In this entry, I’ll take a close look at Scriptura and explain some key differences between this solution and other VDP products.
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Posted on Friday, 27 June 2008 at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Web-to-Print and VDP
Today, we’re seeing an increasing number of Web-to-Print (W2P) solutions on the market. This was particularly evident at drupa this year, where everyone seemed to have their own W2P solution. Some industry analysts have have even dubbed drupa 2008 as the “Web-to-Print drupa”. OK, let’s not get too carried away now…
I’ve done some homework of my own and put together a list of over 30 different W2P solutions available today. That’s a lot of products! Many of these products claim to offer VDP capabilities—it’s almost like a feature checkbox for W2P suppliers; “tick, yes, we do VDP”. It surprised me when talking to many of these suppliers at drupa that when asked about their VDP support, many exclaimed “yes of course, we do that!” But it’s important to understand to what level these W2P solutions offer support for VDP, as I’ve found that many only offer a mail-merge approach which often isn’t sufficient for most VDP campaigns.
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Posted on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Character Images
Several image personalisation solutions (XMPie uImage, DirectSmile and others) let you create characters from individual images, so recipient names can appear in alphabet soup, cubes, dominoes, etc. While these types of image personalisation effects can look impressive, they usually take a considerable amount of time to create as you need to create individual images for the entire alphabet then mask out the background for each ‘character image’.
Well, I’ve found a nice resource for creating different character image effects. iStockphoto is an online stock photography service with an extensive collection of affordable images. If you search their site for the term ‘alphabet’, you’ll see a large selection of pre-shot images that use different objects to create characters, including coffee beans, shells, sand, cubes and more. Some alphabets even suggest appropriate backgrounds. A handy resource, which could save a lot of time!
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Posted on Friday, 20 June 2008 at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)