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Bespoke — The Promise That Breaks at Document Ten Thousand

Database Publishing at Volume: What breaks when thousands of personalised documents are generated from structured data, and what must be automated before the run starts.

Max Dunn has automated Adobe publishing since the mid-1990s, and founded Silicon Publishing in August of 2000 to do database publishing properly. Most companies start personalisation the same way: one template, one spreadsheet, and somebody merging records by hand until midnight. That works for fifty documents and falls apart at ten thousand, where the failures are dull ones nobody budgets for: a name that overflows its box, a language that reflows the page, a record with an empty column. His team, which includes some of the original engineers who created InDesign, automates Firefly Services, InDesign, Photoshop and Express in the cloud for exactly that reason. Leaders promising personalised output at volume hear where the production line actually snaps, and what has to be automated before the first record runs.

About Max Dunn

Max Dunn, podcast guest

President

Since 2000 Co-founded and leads Silicon PublishingBertelsmann Former Director of Software DevelopmentAdobe Publishing automation partner since the 1990sInDesign User Group speaker on automation and AI

Since August 2000 I have run one company on one platform, which is the opposite of the advice most founders are given.

I co-founded Silicon Publishing with Alissa Whitney, now our CTO. There were two of us. We are over twenty now, and in all that time we have never moved to a second platform: everything we build automates Adobe technology. The conventional warning is never to tie your business to another company's software, because the vendor can change its pricing, its direction or its whole product line without asking you. I took the opposite bet and went deeper, and I can say what a quarter of a century on someone else's platform actually demands of you.

Before that I was a software engineer at Bertelsmann in the 1990s, building early systems that combined automated pre-press and database publishing with workflow management. I have worked in publishing automation since the mid-1990s, which means I watched the last great upheaval in this industry from the inside, back when layouts were still assembled by hand. It is the closest thing we have to a rehearsal for what AI is doing to creative work now, and I am candid about what that earlier shift cost and who it passed over.

The part of the business I am proudest of is the bench.

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