The concept of variable data printing is nothing new for quick and small commercial printers. They have been doing a form of rudimentary VDP for years with mail merge jobs. However, taking full advantage of VDP capabilities that are now available in our industry segment calls for a much more sophisticated approach.

The genesis of this month's variable data cover was a conversation during last year's Graph Expo between QP publisher Kelley Holmes and Fred Winckler, Konica Minolta's director of key accounts for franchise print. The gist of the conversation was, "How can we demonstrate to QP readers that VDP capabilities are well within their reach?"

The initial idea was to produce a VDP cover internally on Konica Minolta equipment, but that was soon scrapped when it became obvious that the VDP cover needed to be produced in a real-world print shop in order to make the point. With that in mind, Winckler and Konica Minolta's group manager for marketing communications John Coghlan went through their customer files looking for a shop that had the capabilities to handle the job.

"We were looking for a shop that had two 6500s, which is what we thought necessary for a job like this," says Winckler. "We were franchise neutral in the search, but Jimmy and Judy Brumley's PIP Printing shop in Burlington, NC, turned out to fit the bill, and Jimmy and his team had the time and the willingness to do the job."

With a shop picked out, the project got underway with the most essential element first—getting a clean database. That fell to QP's audience development manager Jackie Dandoy who ran a series of samples to make certain the data fields were as clean as possible. Because this particular VDP project involved a periodical, there were pre-sort requirements that were performed at Publishers Press where QP is printed.

Meanwhile, Konica Minolta's Ted Brolsma began designing a cover that would meet the needs of the project and satisfy the quality demands of a 43,000 circulation trade magazine. When the final design was approved, the project and the QP data files were handed over to Creo's Ari Shapiro.

Various Variables

The front cover design called for more than simple personalization. It included the subscriber's name, an outline of the state in which he or she lived, and the mileage from the reader's location to Chicago and the 2008 Graph Expo. The project also used VDP on the inside front cover where the reader's name appeared in the Creo ad.

Shapiro received the project in Adobe InDesign CS3 and used Creo's DarwinVI Authoring Tool to prepare the print-ready files. Darwin VI lets users "design, author, and manage full-color and complex VDP documents in which every element can be dynamic." It works with Quark and InDesign and runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. "We certainly couldn't have done this project without Creo's help," says Coghlan.