As variable data marketing becomes the norm, planning your design becomes even more important. The place to start is with your database. For any areas that will contain variable data – name, references to a product, or larger sections of copy – plan your design to accommodate the longest string of data in that field. While it is possible to compress a font, often that’s not the desirable approach from a design standpoint.
If you plan to include images as part of your variable data, all of the images for any one spot should be sized similarly. The printing process will integrate the data and will drop each image into the space designated. Inserting a large image when a smaller spot has been saved will change the look of your final printed piece – and probably not in a good way!
