The Big Book series of travel planners

A while back, in collaboration with shopfrontdesign, two designers produced nearly 800 designed pages for a series of travel planners called the Big Books. A lot of time has past since producing these publications and now would be a good time to kick back and talk about some of the technology used to produce them.

InDesign all the way

When InDesign came along a few years ago I was a seasoned QuarkXPress (or Quirk) user. Versions 1 and 2 of ID were a bit slow, crashed a fair bit, and were generally difficult to use. But the potential was really there to give Qxp a run for it’s money. Then the Adobe Creative Suite came out with InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat Pro for less than half of what Quark cost. At last the ridiculously priced, bug-laden and un-progressive Quark had a real competitor. And what a competitor.

The feature list and capabilities of InDesign is long as it’s extensibility. But it was after using an early demo of 65-bit’s EasyCatalog that sold me on using it together with InDesign for the Big Book publications.

EasyCatalog (EC)

EasyCatalog is a plugin that works within InDesign. If this product didn’t exist then the layout of 500 complex text and image advertisements would have taken months instead of weeks and taken many more layout artists to complete.

This is what one looks like.

Now imagine setting 500 of these manually with the information only available to you via emails or a spreadsheet. With all those snippets of information you’d then create each ad by:

• copy/paste each bit of info into the layout;
• be able to find it and make changes in an instant across four publications;
• send a finished PDF to each advertiser for approval;
• track each one through the production cycle.

A more dynamic solution had to be found. Enter EasyCatalog. The concept behind EC is that it enables you a great degree of automation when setting repetitive data. It’s centered around having a template container for that data to flow into. The this case there are template fields for each part of the advertisement – text and images.

Another strength to EC is its ability to access a database like MySQL using a simple query. This query returns a spreadsheet-like grid of information right into the EC panel within InDesign. From there it’s a simple case of choosing an ad template to use (there were different ones depending on the size of the ad paid for) and then dragging the entry into the layout.

The basic column ad production process.

Updates

At the draft stage, changes to each ad was a real possibility. EC handles this situation extremely well. By re-running the query it visually highlights any data that has been changed. It’s then possible to simply update either every amended entry with new data or do it selectively. I can’t tell you the amount of time saved doing changes this way.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with what EasyCatalog can do and it’s well worth the price of admission in the time and carpal tunnel it saves you.