Danone is marketing a holiday edition of its Sparkles flavoured water brand with unique bottle designs created by HP SmartStream Collage, HP Indigo’s new automated variable design software. The wrap-around bottle labels were produced by Folienprint Rako, an All4Labels Group company, in the first HP Collage packaging production in Europe.
The bottles feature playful, winter-themed designs by Danish artist Emil Kozak, perfect to celebrate the holiday season with family, friends and colleagues. The 1.25 liter drinks, now available at retailers in Denmark, combine design elements such as snowflakes, reindeer, and candy canes to create 100,000 unique labels for two berry flavors of Aqua d’Or Sparkles water.
HP SmartStream Collage uses algorithms to create random combinations of specified design elements, thereby creating one-of-a-kind artwork for unlimited impact for packaging, commercial, and specialty printing. The variable design creates movement in the appearance of the bottles across the shelves.
“Aqua d’Or is spreading some holiday magic with playful designs on its flavoured water bottles for celebrations using the new HP Collage design capability with HP digital printing,” said Line Giessing Jørgensen, Brand Manager at Danone. “This new software technology provides brands with the opportunity to amplify the seasonality of their products in creative ways.”
HP SmartStream Collage is the next generation of HP Indigo hyper-customization software, introduced to the market with HP SmartStream Mosaic. Danone used Mosaic and Kozak’s designs for its “Flow Your Way” summer mineral water bottle campaign. The brand decided to try the new HP Collage at Folienprint Rako to create a new twist in variable design printing on its Sparkles flavoured water product line, which uses plastic from 50% recycled materials.
“Brands can now bring a new experience using variable design element printing, including for seasonal products and flavours, and attract attention to their products. The HP SmartStream Collage design software for HP Indigo digital printing offers big new packaging marketing potential,” said Michel Koch, head of pre-press digital at All4Labels.
The power of HP print design software
HP Collage gives brands, agencies and converters the ability to create endless variations of a set of basic elements defined by the user. These can include images, logos or text, then combined according to individual rules. Users can control parameters such as minimum and maximum number of repetitions for each element, rotation and size resulting in hundreds, thousands or even millions of unique designs for high-value, high-quality print applications.
It is a new capability of HP SmartStream Designer, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator.
“HP Collage offers brands a new design tool for creativity and shelf impact, generating excitement and buzz for the product,” added Jose Gorbea, HP EMEA brand owner, Digital Print Solutions for Brands.
The Sparkles labels were printed on the 76 cm-wide HP Indigo 20000 Digital Press, delivering high-volume, mid-web format label printing on a wide range of materials, and converted into print-ready PDF files with the cloud-based HP PrintOS Composer.
