The use of Product Groups and Variants are key to displaying information on a printed page in an optimised way.
Typically you’ll have tables to show all the variants, displaying information such as color and size options. You may also want to amalgamate data together such as showing a list of information or range.
The video below shows how this can be achieved in pimsimple using the InDesign Client software.
Let’s breakdown what we can see…
At the top of the page are typical InDesign Client tags belonging to the Product Group. They’re simply labeled with the attribute for the group title “Article”. So each product has [Article01], [Article02] and so on.
Below that we have a graphic frame, script labelled with the media attribute name.
Then we have a few different ways of displaying variant data. The first two products have text frames which contain all the variant attributes we want. The frame itself is then script labeled with the product number [01], [02] etc.
This makes displaying data incredibly easy, and to copy the same design to another product you simply relabel it with that product’s number. There is however a catch and that is that the attribute name is typically much bigger than the value, so you have text like “[Size04]” that resolves to just “18” this makes things a bit messy.
The third product on the page gets round this problem by using a table to display information. In the case of this product the table itself has no label but the text frame it is in is labeled “[03]” (third product)
The text within the cells is irrelevant and just a placeholder. The cells are indicated by the script labels of each cell.
Again this makes it easy to reuse tables between products because you simply change the script label of the text frame in which it is contained.
The final option is especially useful if you have multiple tables in the same text frame. In the example of products 4,5 & 6 in the video each of these are the same tables as product 3, but instead of labelling the text frame the table itself is labeled [04], [05] & [06] respectively.
The final options allow you to amalgamate the variant data. So you might have a range of colors, prices and sizes for a product but rather than list each one you can get the system to display either a list, range, high value or low value.
Product 5 has a “flash” with a tag [Sizes05-Range] in the text frame. This will show the first and last value in the variants for the attribute “Size” for Product 5. In the video this resolves to the text “6-18” as “8” is the smallest size and “18” is the largest
Product 6 has two “flashes” the first shows the tag “[RRP06-From]” this will show the lowest numerical value for an attribute called “RRP” (recommended retail price) for product 6.
Finally product 6 has a flash similar to the one on product 5, but instead of the suffix “Range” it has the suffix “List”. So instead of displaying “6-18” it lists all the values “6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18”
