Designers and developers are often seen as opposites — one driven by creativity, the other by logic.

Without diving into a philosophical debate about art versus technique, I’d like to share a practical example showing how development skills can significantly streamline a complex print project.

A Practical Case: DANgo for Danone

The DANgo project was far from a typical marketing brochure. It was a large-scale internal catalog used by multiple departments at Danone, containing over 600 pages of detailed, structured information.

The client provided the full content in an Excel file — each row representing a page, with columns for titles, descriptions, visuals, and icons.

Faced with the scale of the document and the repetitiveness of the layout, I proposed a solution that would automate the catalog’s production using XML.

Rather than manually designing hundreds of pages in InDesign, the idea was to build a pipeline that would bring efficiency, consistency, and flexibility.

From Spreadsheet to Automated Layout

I built a custom XML-based workflow in Adobe InDesign:

• The Excel file was exported to XML via OpenOffice.

• I used XSLT scripts to clean and reshape the data: renaming tags, injecting icons, replacing text content, and linking external image files (.ai).

• I then created InDesign templates that mirrored this XML structure — ensuring seamless import and rendering.

Once the XML was injected, InDesign automatically flowed the content across all pages.

The result: a fully structured catalog assembled in a fraction of the usual time — with far fewer human errors, and full control over design consistency.

Scalable and Reusable

This approach proved so effective that it was reused for other projects, including the ESCardio Congress Program and Zeades Monte-Carlo, demonstrating that even print projects benefit from technical workflows.

Bridging Creativity and Logic

As a designer with a background in communication technologies, I’ve always believed that code and creativity are not mutually exclusive.

In projects like this, development doesn’t just support design — it amplifies it, by removing the repetitive to focus on what matters: clarity, visual meaning, and impact.

So yes — even in a 100% print context, knowing how to script, automate and structure can turn a monumental task into a smart, scalable workflow.