Vila Etiketten, one of the largest Dutch label makers, produced the special edition for the Heet Zuur Hop food festival in the Netherlands with HP SmartStream Collage.
An Optimum Group company, Vila Etiketten is a fully digital label and packaging converter operating five HP Indigo digital presses. Vila Etiketten was approached by Dokter Worst to see what possibilities were available for a limited edition hot sauce dedicated to the festival.
Since the artwork for the festival was already designed, Vila offered to create unique and one-of-a-kind labels with HP SmartStream Collage design software. At first the labels look the same, but after a better look one sees that the graphical elements are different on each and every label. Vila pulled out the key design elements from the artwork, including hot peppers, limes, hops, and pineapples--representing the ingredients of the hot sauce--then activated HP Collage in a playful way.
HP SmartStream Collage uses algorithms to create random combinations of specified design elements, thereby creating one-of-a-kind artwork for packaging or commercial printing. The variable design creates movement in the appearance of the bottles across the shelves.
The unique pressure-sensitive labels were printed on an HP Indigo 8000 Digital Press. The cartons for the set of three glass bottles was printed on the HP Indigo 30000 Digital Press for folding cartons.
"Without losing the identity of both my sauce and the festival, Vila helped us create unique labels that trigger the attention and complement the bottles of hot sauce,” Jeroen de Bont, owner of Dokter Worst, said:
HP SmartStream Collage is the next generation of HP Indigo hyper-customization software, introduced to the market after HP SmartStream Mosaic. It is a new capability of HP SmartStream Designer, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator.
“With SmartStream Collage,” says Hugo de Graaf, Head of Pre-press Digital at Vila Etiketten, “HP offers us yet another opportunity to give our customers a great marketing tool. From our smallest customers to the biggest brands, we now can supply them with unique labels going from massive designs to a subtle change while staying true to the identity of the product. Since we are already specialists in Variable Data Printing, this is a huge benefit and an extra value-add towards our customers.”
