10 years of being wild—our anniversary greetings

Crazy? Impetuous? Passionate! What began in 2016 as an attempt to finally produce truly sophisticated, high-quality printed materials again took an unexpected turn when combined with a curiosity for digital possibilities. Today, WirbelWild realises not only classically designed and typeset layouts, but also concepts and designs that become highly flexible, customised printed materials. These are implemented using the company's own layout automation software, ManyPrint Solutions, and with the help of APIs.

The anniversary greetings—which we sent out this year instead of our traditional New Year's greetings—are therefore also personalised, of course.

Here we go again! What makes our brochure so special

It goes without saying that we wanted to herald our anniversary year in a very special way. Our annual greeting card offers us the ideal opportunity to give free rein to our ideas in terms of both content and design. This time, we decided on a handy brochure in 11 × 14 cm format that people would be happy to hold in their hands for a little longer.

The 16-page booklet was printed on 150 gsm ‘Wild’ uncoated paper—how wonderful when beautiful paper, personal reasons, and the name fit together so well! — by Römerturm using Canon's high-speed inkjet technology.

In keeping with our anniversary, the front page features an abstract 10, shown in its basic forms of a square and a circle. These shapes continue on the inside pages and can be found on both sides of each sheet. As with all our New Year's greetings, the company blue colour once again dominates the cover.

In addition to a personalised message and a language version in German or English, the approximately 600 recipients receive one of four colour designs, in which the backgrounds, monochrome images, underlining and signatures vary. The brochures also contain personalised text passages for each recipient, which we have written as an expression of our appreciation.

On the occasion of our anniversary, we invite recipients to send us their consent to receive further ideas from the WirbelWild think tank. To this end, each brochure contains an individual link (PURL) with a QR code to a personalised landing page for feedback. Two short questions, the answers to which will be included in the anniversary mailing, complete the survey. The landing page is also used to give recipients easy access to the links mentioned in the brochure, as the brochure should not be overloaded with QR codes, although experience shows that links are rarely or never typed in.

The technical implementation

As always, our layout automation enabled the efficient production of the 600 brochures.

• Easy handling of text variables and conditions, depending on address and gender
• Automated creation of PURLs and QR codes using our own link shortener go2.link
• Template-free layout management, which has made it easy to implement colour variations
• Automatic semantic hyphenation thanks to our Hyphenizer
• As always, everything is subject to the highest design standards, ensuring that every brochure looks handmade and that no individualisation is visible through a visual break in the design and layout.

… everything else remains the same

We want to continue to stand for trying new things, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and finding sophisticated solutions for demanding applications. We see this aspiration as part of our DNA, and that will not change in the next ten years.

For us, a value-based culture of reason, prudence, appreciation, responsibility and dialogue is non-negotiable. It doesn't matter if politics, society and entrepreneurship are increasingly moving in the opposite direction. Exclusion and harshness must not become the norm! The well-being of future generations should always serve as our compass. We live diversity and inclusion in our team and base our management on sustainability goals and an economy for the common good.

We will not compromise the trust we have built up and consolidated over ten years for the sake of the latest hype: we will continue to no manipulative marketing tricks, nor will we rush headlong into trendy promises of salvation such as AI-enabled gimmicks at the expense of others. Our trusting relationships are too valuable to us for that.

And so, over the next 10 years, we will continue to focus on remaining crazy, impetuous, and passionately innovative, refusing to accept some things and initiating others—always with the satisfying feeling of leaving our mark and making a difference.

Cheers to the next 10 years!