RESOURCES
Data Merge is an effective tactic to make your communications stand out from the competition, and Adobe InDesign and Illustrator include a built-in feature to help with this task. But what if you need more options and flexibility, and you want to spend more time focusing on the actual design, instead of getting swamped by the data merge process?
With XMPie you can do everything that is possible with the in-built Adobe tools, and take it to a much higher level. You can personalize or customize any element of a print-based InDesign layout or control changes within still or moving artwork to reach one or millions of recipients. This way you can demonstrate that you understand each of your customers, who they are, what they want, and most importantly, that you value their business.
By using XMPie, you’ll have more control in the way that you connect to the data, more control over what you can creatively do with the data (without have to touch the actual data file) and you ultimately have more control over how you create the output.
This is one of XMPie’s sweet spots, as it natively supports the Adobe workflow via its variable data plug-ins. By allowing you to turn your documents or artwork into templates, you can streamline the entire workflow. When the document or artwork is ready to be created, XMPie software merges the data, and logic with the design in real-time to generate highly relevant, personalized pieces with no pre-processing steps that would inevitably cause inconsistencies.
Data Merge Software
Go beyond Data Merge: Let’s take a look at the different XMPie plug-ins and what you can do with them:
VDP/Data Merge InDesign Plug-In
uCreate Print, aka uDirect, is our desktop VDP solution that harnesses the Adobe InDesign workflow:
- Drive variability into every aspect of your InDesign document.
- Create variable content or designs for different document versions
- Create your templates, with fewer steps in the design workflow – instead of supplying various designs of the same document.
- Benefit from InDesign’s feature-rich interface to provide support for brand compliance and strict color management.
- Retain the quality of the design into the variable data print stream, as if you were printing each document manually straight from the Adobe application; XMPie harnesses Adobe’s technology as part of the composition process.
- Take full advantage of today’s modern digital printers and their support for special effects by adding them to your template natively within InDesign – and even personalize those effects!
- Don’t worry about converting your document like you need to do with other proprietary platforms. XMPie works natively with InDesign so you can streamline your work and boost efficiencies in your review and edits cycles.
- Create a template for personalization, then print one, or print millions. The artwork doesn’t need to change, XMPie scales-up to handle your output.
uImage Photoshop and Illustrator Plug-In
Personalize images to grab attention with uImage, our Adobe Photoshop plugin:
- Use Photoshop or Illustrator to create your image. Transform it into a template with XMPie so that it can be used again and again to create individual pieces of content for different recipients.
- Personalize any image or graphic, such as a customer’s name or a specific message displayed to a particular subset of customers.
- Use your knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator and your imagination to create almost any kind of unique image effect.
- Integrate your uImages into any design workflow or campaign.
- Add multiple layers containing multiple variable elements and include both dynamic text and dynamic images in one file.
- Leverage the Smart Object feature in Photoshop to creating personalized images while maintaining all the effects that can be applied to Smart Object layers. For example, using Image Warping capabilities, you can wrap images around 3D surfaces leading to highly-realistic results.
- Easily create two versions of each file for cross-media applications – one high-resolution for print, and one low-resolution for the Web or email.
- Get royalty-free and commercially editable templates that are ready to use from the XMPie Marketplace.
XMPie Video Services
Using XMPie’s AfterEffects Plug-in, you can add personalized videos that are targeted to your customers with data-driven variable content:
- Create sophisticated videos that are personalized to the recipient with data-driven variable content.
- Produce highly dynamic videos with compelling content and cinematic-quality visual effects to grab the viewers’ attention.
- Style your customer data inside the video. Incorporate variable text, images, and other footage with special effects like animate, wiggle, shatter, blur, warp, distort, and much more.
- Synchronize your print and digital touchpoints with personalized videos to drive a stronger customer journey. For example, you can add a Personalized URL (PURL) or QR code to a print piece to drive recipients to a personalized video; a potent trigger to spur action from the customer.
