Variable Art/Data Software Question

Factual Questions
1

I have question for graphic design / advertising / printing folks:

At my work we saw a sample of a color postcard advertising a coffee shop in which the addressee had their name printed on the top of the coffee in a cup in which the cinnamon sprinkled on the top was shaped to be the person’s name.

I doubt it was a font, because the sprinkles of cinnamon dust were composed of all sorts of different colors within the same letters. I know it was a mass mailing, so I seriously doubt they had an artist create an image for each individual to be addressed.

Does anyone know how they might have done this? Is there a program that can take a list of names and output a set of .gifs that could be dropped into a variable printing program? Is there perhaps a variable data printing / design suite that I’m unaware of that can accomplish this?

I’ve worked in variable print for some time, and I haven’t come across anything that can do this… somebody help!

2

I’m not a graphic design person, so some of your question went right over my head…

But, I’ve scripted ImageMagick to take text strings and output gifs.

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/

3

— never mind —

4

They could do the design in word or publisher and mail merge in just a name field. Non uniform fills are also simple enough.

5

I have a photo manipulation program called PhotoImpact by Ulead Systems - it’s not even a particularly advanced, expensive or fancy one, although it is quite feature-rich and functional.

I can create text objects, apply lots of effects, filters, rendering, transformation, etc to the text, but still be able to edit it as text. It also incoporates a batch/macro processor, so I think I could probably set it up to do something like you’re describing. The trick is in getting all the effects layers onto the text to make it look convincingly part of the image.

I’m not suggesting that’s what has been used here, but it sounds like something similar. I’d be surprised if there’s anything PhotoImpact can do that Photoshop can’t do at least a little better.

6

Once you have a sprinkles texture pattern, you can apply it to an image in any shape you like, including via text fonts.

7

I just tried a quick and dirty experiment with a fake engraving on an image of the Avebury diamond stone and it’s quite easy:
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/stuff/AveburySD.jpg
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/stuff/AveburyMT.jpg

-getting it to look like powdered cocoa on milk would be marginally more difficult, but that’s artistic difficulty, not technical.

8

Sorry it’s taken me more than a month to respond. I had seen something like this at the print shop I patronize, but it was only today that I remembered to ask the proprietor what the program was called.

The one I saw was Direct Smile. If that’s not the one that created the sample you saw, it seems to be able to do something very similar. You can try it out online at that Web site.

9

Thank you! This may be exactly what we’re looking for.