I'm trying to create a mailer for a group with about a thousand members, and the client wants to have each image personalized with the member's name such as you may have seen on those "my name in the picture" calendars. Here's an example for clarification:
http://www.americancalendar.com/intheimage/
The graphic design is no problem, but I'm certainly not getting paid enough to manually arrange every name on the list. I'm sure these companies have some way of automating the process. They must create the "font" then be able to auto-fill the right name/messages, but I can't figure out that workflow in my head. If the names were written in simpler fonts this would be a cake walk, but some of these fonts look more complicated than I know how to easily automate (in the example above, the blocks-of-snow and hay bale fonts, and I think there are environmental lighting and shadow effects on the lilypad and apple fonts).
Creating each of these images alone is well within my ability, but I've never really worked with font creation and, as I said, the automation in this project is throwing me for a loop. Can anyone help me figure this process out? Can I do it with just Photoshop and InDesign?
