This all sounds highly automatable.
While I’m not familiar with Dutch road signs and their precise layout requirements, I’ve prepared a quick video to demonstrate some of the general principles. While bespoke JavaScripts are certainly an option, I’ve used my kiwi language (originally developed for food labeling) to extract two rows of sample data from an Excel spreadsheet and insert it into a tagged Illustrator template, resizing and repositioning the various elements to fit.
This demo generates two artworks from one spreadsheet and one template file, but there’s no limit on the number of templates and artworks that can be handled. More advanced requirements, such as placing prebuilt icons from an icon library, can be supported too.
Incidentally, using a pure Illustrator-based solution (as opposed to, say, a PDF-based automation engine) also has the great advantage that you’re not locked into an all-or-nothing workflow, where artworks must be either 100% automatable or not at all. Generating ordinary .ai files allows artworkers to continue editing by hand once the automation has run.
This approach allows you to grow your automation organically: quickly automating everyday simple tasks (e.g. text insertion and styling) for perhaps an immediate 20-40% reduction in production times over 100% manual artworking. Once this initial semi-automated (“autonomated”) workflow is running smoothly in production, less common/more challenging steps may be incrementally automated later on if/when ROI justifies the additional development. While other tasks, such as aesthetic layout decisions, are naturally best left to human operators to carry out.
If you’ve any questions or would like to discuss further, please get in touch.
Best regards,
Hamish Sanderson
Artwork Automation Specialist
Dear fellows,
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