Getting the Copy Right

While making a product visible and distinctive may be a brand owner's top priority, it is not the only priority. Businesses also must satisfy a variety of requirements regarding the ways in which packages and labels communicate how to use, transport, recycle, or dispose of the product. With pharmaceuticals, food, medical, and chemical products, some types of information are required by the Food and Drug Administration.

Generally speaking, the term "label" refers to the text printed on a product package to support advertising claims, establish brand identity, and enhance name recognition. The main body of legislation governing packaging and labeling, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966, mandates that every product package or label must specify the product type; producer or processor's name and location; quantity, if applicable; and number and size of servings, if applicable, on that part of the label most visible to consumers. Labels for edible products must display sodium content if other nutritional information is shown, as well as showing ingredients. Certain food items also are required to display inspection labels.

In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act intended primarily to discourage misleading labeling touting the dubious health benefits of certain food items. Under the 1990 law, food labels are required to list specific values such as calorie and cholesterol content and fat and saturated fat percentages, as well as sodium levels.

Searching for "the truth"

Given the type and volume of information (content) a label must display with absolute accuracy, it isn't hard to understand the challenges associated with managing all this data such that only the most up-to-date, accurate information is selected and reproduced. Stephen Kaufman, chief technology officer for Schawk, Inc. (www.schawk.com), refers to this as "the truth," or the "system of record." The twist, he says, is that the truth is rarely static. Rather, it continually evolves in accordance with the customers' needs, changing market conditions, legal requirements, and other variables. In reality, packaging text may be revised a number of times before it goes to press, with no guarantee that eleventh-hour modifications will wind up reflected in the content management system (CMS) where the data reside.

And there's the rub. The complexity of packaging work and a product's movement through the supply chain ups the ante on accuracy and burdens every typo with potentially disastrous consequences in terms of cost (time, labor, rework, etc.). The irony is that most CMSs being used today, especially in retail and consumer product package design, are a hodge-podge of Excel, Word, or other programs that require text file (documents) to be updated by hand and submitted for approval.

"We can and do work like this, but not quickly," Kaufman says. A faster, cleaner, and less error-prone option, and one that Schawk has been helping to pioneer, he says, is to create the data once, and transfer it to workflow applications throughout the supply chain from a common database. This enables users to download critical information directly from its source.

The central problem is this: How do you get "the truth" correctly onto a piece of packaging artwork? According to Kaufman, this involves correlating the actual copy or information—the content itself, no matter how it's written—with the expression (layout, readability) of that content. As noted above, information such as bar codes, ingredients, legal notifications, safety warnings, and the like, traditionally has been built into packaging artwork by the designer, who accesses the data from a multitude of disparate sources, file formats, departments, and approval systems—a highly inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone process.

Responsibility moves upstream

Enter "dynamic content," a concept developed by the Intelligent Packaging Consortium (IPC), a group whose stated mission is "to define and promote industry standard artwork solutions [and] enable speed, integration, agility, and productivity in the supply chain." The technical goal of the workgroup, whose current members include Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Coca-Cola Inc., Schawk, BearingPoint, Adobe (www.adobe.com), and EskoArtwork (www.esko.com), is to develop a packaging-oriented XML specification (IPC XML) that incorporates structured data into the packaging supply chain by placing the responsibility for content development directly with the consumer product company via direct plug-in to Adobe Illustrator.

According to Kaufman, adoption of the IPC XML specification enables accurate packaging information to travel from the system of record (residing securely with the brand owner) through the supply chain (Schawk) to the manufacturing entity (the converter) to the retail shelf. Although Kaufman says that Schawk currently processes between 1,400 and 1,500 designs or between 2 and 3 percent of the packages it handles each month using the IPC XML method, widespread adoption of the specification still has a long way to go. This is especially true in the less regulated retail and consumer products market. Because pharmaceutical firms must comply with strict governmental regulation of their label content, pharmaceutical packaging lends itself quite handily to a dynamic workflow solution, Kaufman observes.

XML in use

EskoArtwork's Dynamic Content module, for example, allows package developers to fix the position of each design element on the package and tie the content of each element to a location in a secure database accessible over a secure public or private network. These tools effectively separate the package's textual content from its layout, so the text of a package design can be outsourced and maintained from outside Adobe Illustrator. Thus, a graphic designer has a nearly foolproof way to access up-to-date product information in real time and automatically position it within the graphic design.

Linking directly to the consumer product company's database obviates the need for hand-keying. This dramatically reduces the risk of error, cuts time-to-market, and boosts the efficiency of content management by ensuring that the designer is always working from the system of record. Because the EskoArtwork software can read IPC XML, Kaufman explains, Schawk has been able to take label information in XML format and express it via Dynamic Content.

From a production standpoint, Kaufman says, the process takes place on three levels. At level one, "We gather, inspect, and massage the customer data, making sure they are clean." This works best with very structured information, as in pharmaceutical labeling. At level two, he says, "We add graphics, icons, and images." Level three includes the creation of tables, such as nutrition facts panels, an area where Dynamic Content enables the designer to flow, rather than to hand-enter the necessary information, eliminating the need for "nipping, tucking, tweaking," and other labor-intensive exercises.

"Once Schawk analyzes the source data, creates a working process, and constructs the templates, production time can be significantly reduced, sometimes compressing three hours of work into just one or two," Kaufman says. "The fact is, packaging changes that previously were simply too expensive to execute now come into reach with a well-implemented dynamic content strategy." pP