InDesign CS3: Mastering Design Collaboration

Solving the Problem with Book File Collaboration

C’mon. Do you real­ly expect me to assign three design­ers to one page? No, of course not, at least not in most work­flows. Don’t take me too lit­er­al­ly. The one-page exam­ple and dia­gram can be inter­pret­ed lit­er­al­ly or as an alle­go­ry for a much larg­er doc­u­ment. Collaborating via placed pages works just as well with mul­ti­ple pages. Remember above when I list­ed the types of doc­u­ments and cir­cum­stances under which a Book File Collaboration Workflow won’t work? Well, the Placed Page Collaboration Workflow does work on those doc­u­ments and under those circumstances.

Periodicals often fol­low a com­mon work­flow based on divi­sion and duplication–Divide and Copy and Conquer, I call it. Initially, a tem­plate is cre­at­ed con­tain­ing all the pages in the book. Department and reg­u­lar fea­tures pages are laid out, ad pages are assigned, and FPOs are insert­ed for fea­ture arti­cle spreads and oth­er con­tent. Then you, the cre­ative direc­tor, sit down and plan the page parcel­ing. You may divide it equal­ly among your design­ers and pro­duc­tion artists. You would then save one addi­tion­al copy of the tem­plate for each design­er. Alternatively, you might appor­tion the tem­plate by log­i­cal struc­ture. In that case, regard­less of the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing on the next issue, you would divide the doc­u­ment into its spaces. For instance, the three pages blocked out for the first fea­ture arti­cle would be a sin­gle space and one com­plete copy of the tem­plate, the two pages for the “Letters to the Editor” depart­ment anoth­er copy, and so on until all sec­tions of the pub­li­ca­tion have been account­ed for in copies of the ini­tial template.

Figure 12.3 dia­grams the com­mon Divide and Copy and Conquer method of design­ing and lay­ing out peri­od­i­cals. In this case, the pub­li­ca­tion has been appor­tioned to the three pro­duc­tion artists plus pages for your­self (you’re at the bot­tom of the flow­chart; I wouldn’t be so pre­sump­tu­ous as to make a LEGO per­son of you). Earlier we talked about jump­ing a sto­ry from page 19 to page 32, which is where the flow­chart picks up. Pages 1 through 18 we’ll assume have been assigned to oth­er pro­duc­tion artists. Rachael, Carlos, and Kim are your best peo­ple, any­way. They’re busy folks, but then they’re LEGO design­ers; they have no lives and don’t need cof­fee breaks. The green pages are Rachael’s to design, the blue belong to Carlos, the red to Kim, and the gold­en­rod are yours. Ad pages are blocked out entire­ly, await­ing PDF and EPS ads that will be dropped in dur­ing pagination.

Figure 12.3 Flowchart of a com­mon peri­od­i­cal pub­li­ca­tion workflow

Examine the flow­chart. This type of col­lab­o­ra­tion is com­mon because it offers the ben­e­fit of main­tain­ing auto­mat­ic page num­ber­ing. The fea­ture sto­ry jumps from pages 19 to 32, and, by leav­ing all inter­ven­ing pages in place, page 32 is num­bered as such with­out the need to man­u­al­ly type 32 into a text frame and change it should pages be added, delet­ed, or re-ordered. Because all four copies of the tem­plate are com­plete copies, Rachael knows she’s work­ing on pages 21–23 while Carlos has pages 25, 26, and 28, Kim has pages 30–31, and you have the fea­ture sto­ry on pages 19 and 32. Everyone knows where her or his work falls with­in the book, and the pub­li­ca­tion TOC can then be built by hand with rea­son­able assur­ance of its accu­ra­cy (auto­mat­ic TOC gen­er­a­tion is impos­si­ble at this stage because there are four of every page, so the var­i­ous ver­sions can­not be tied togeth­er via a book file).

Regardless of its ben­e­fits, this type of col­lab­o­ra­tion has sig­nif­i­cant inher­ent prob­lems. Can you spot them? I found several.

1. Let’s start with the fact that there are no arrows. Flowcharts are sup­posed to have arrows, right? I mean, that’s the flow part of flow­chart. There are no arrows because noth­ing moves, noth­ing and no one inter­acts. Rachael does her thing, Carlos his, Kim hers, you yours. None of you has the slight­est idea what the oth­ers are up to. That’s a prob­lem in itself, but it also leads to oth­er prob­lems. Such as…

2. You, the cre­ative direc­tor, have no insight into, or over­sight of, what your peo­ple are doing short of walk­ing up behind them or ask­ing them to stop pro­duc­tive work to print or email proofs. If you don’t get proofs (or peer over shoul­ders), odds are good you’ll be sur­prised by the pages at the eleventh hour and find your­self ask­ing for changes. Even if you do get proofs, how often is it prac­ti­cal to check up on and coor­di­nate with your design­ers? If Kim does some­thing that doesn’t work with Carlos’s design, one of them has to change, but after how many work hours have been invest­ed? How much does each change cost you?

3. Everyone is work­ing from a sep­a­rate and com­plete copy of the entire pub­li­ca­tion tem­plate. Magazine struc­tures don’t often change with­out rebuild­ing the entire tem­plate, but they do change from time to time. Pages in oth­er types of mul­ti­page, team-effort pub­li­ca­tions are often shuf­fled around with pages added or removed here and there. In a work­flow of the sort shown in the dia­gram, such a change is a night­mare. To add a page in the mid­dle of the pub­li­ca­tion or shift one sec­tion behind anoth­er entails coor­di­nat­ing with each of the design­ers to make the iden­ti­cal change in every copy of the tem­plate. Done infre­quent­ly by very orga­nized, detail-oriented cre­atives, such struc­tur­al alter­ations can be accom­plished smooth­ly. The dif­fi­cul­ty and like­li­hood of mis­takes increas­es in direct pro­por­tion to the fre­quen­cy and num­ber of such changes and with the lev­el of stress on the cre­atives. One slipup and you could be spend­ing quite a bit of time try­ing to puz­zle your pub­li­ca­tion back together.

4. Pagination with this type of pub­li­ca­tion is a roy­al pain in the… neck. At the end of the pub­li­ca­tion cycle, some­one must sit down with all the pieces of the pub­li­ca­tion and pull out only the orig­i­nal pages from each ver­sion and then com­bine all those pieces into a sin­gle pub­li­ca­tion. Typically this is done by sav­ing each page indi­vid­u­al­ly to EPS or PDF and then plac­ing those one at a time into yet anoth­er tem­plate duplicate.

The work­flow pre­sent­ed in Figure 12.3 is extreme­ly com­mon. It’s also a huge waste of time and mon­ey because, for many such work­flows, there’s a bet­ter way.

Let’s review the key pro­duc­tion prob­lem that forces a Divide and Copy and Conquer work­flow. If you have a mag­a­zine, news­pa­per, newslet­ter, mag­a­log, or oth­er doc­u­ment with jumped sto­ries, you can’t divide the pub­li­ca­tion into mul­ti­ple Book panel–managed files with­out sev­er­ing the thread­ing between frames of jumped sto­ries. You also can’t break out the pages in between the sto­ry jumps and expect auto­mat­ic page num­ber­ing to work across the book. You can, how­ev­er, use placed pages in addi­tion to a book file to give you everything–automatic page num­ber­ing, thread­ed jumped sto­ries, and con­cur­rent pro­duc­tiv­i­ty–with­out risky struc­tur­al alter­ations or gru­el­ing pag­i­na­tion work at the end.

The chart in Figure 12.4, which con­tin­ues with the exam­ple of a sto­ry that jumps from page 19 to page 32, demon­strates plac­ing pages in a mul­ti­page doc­u­ment. In this case, the cre­ative direc­tor is using both a book file and placed pages. To han­dle the jumped sto­ry, one booked doc­u­ment includes pages 19 through 32 inclu­sive. Intervening pages are assigned out to Rachael, Carlos, and Kim. The design­ers work in sep­a­rate INDD doc­u­ments that are placed as linked assets in the main doc­u­ment; there are no redun­dant, unused pages in the doc­u­ments the design­ers receive. Each com­po­nent doc­u­ment is either sin­gle pages or mul­ti­ple pages, whichev­er is need­ed. Multipage INDD doc­u­ment assets can be placed just as eas­i­ly as can mul­ti­page PDFs–one page at a time. Therefore, even though Carlos’s three pages are non­con­sec­u­tive, bro­ken by the full-page ad on page 27, he can still car­ry a thread­ed sto­ry through all three pages. When his pages are placed into the main pub­li­ca­tion doc­u­ment, they’re placed as pages 25–26 and 28; he works on con­sec­u­tive pages even though they won’t be print­ed as con­sec­u­tive pages. He doesn’t have to break the text flow; he can work in a sin­gle three-page doc­u­ment, enjoy­ing thread­ing and all the oth­er ben­e­fits of work­ing in only one doc­u­ment, with­out caus­ing prob­lems for the main doc­u­ment. In fact, Carlos’s pages can be moved around in the main doc­u­ment (and renum­bered auto­mat­i­cal­ly) with­out the need to even involve Carlos.

Figure 12.4 Diagram of a Placed Page Collaboration Workflow in a mul­ti­page document

There is legit­i­mate use for Placed Page Collaboration in the occa­sion­al one-page doc­u­ment. But, it’s with mul­ti­page doc­u­ments that it real­ly shines–particularly if, for one rea­son or anoth­er, you can’t use Book File Collaboration or using it alone doesn’t solve your work­flow prob­lems. By free­ing cre­atives from the need to sit on their hands or per­form busy­work while wait­ing to get access to doc­u­ments, your orga­ni­za­tion saves mon­ey and time. You’ll also save time and mon­ey by elim­i­nat­ing the need for a pag­i­na­tor to impose in a scram­ble at the last minute, going through all the full-document tem­plates, select­ing and impos­ing all the need­ed pages sit­ting here and there among dozens of emp­ty or FPO pages.

Going to Press with Placed Pages

Point made, but there’s no way it will print. Why not? Why is it that, every time some­one presents a new way of doing things in InDesign, the first response is always, I bet it won’t print. QuarkXPress doesn’t suf­fer this kind of cyn­i­cism. Placing INDD files inside oth­er INDD files is exact­ly like plac­ing Illustrator AI files or even EPS images. It’s anoth­er linked asset, albeit one that can have its own linked assets, but it prints, pack­ages, and exports to PDF just fine. Again, I can per­son­al­ly attest to it.

So, how do I out­put? Same as any InDesign doc­u­ment you did yes­ter­day or last week–print it, pack­age it, or export it to PDF. You can also do all of those through a Book pan­el the same way you did it before you placed pages.

One thing you’ll be glad to know is that InDesign’s Package fea­ture is placed-page aware. When you place INDD pages into anoth­er INDD doc­u­ment, you’ve cre­at­ed a lay­er of nest­ing. The placed INDD can have its own fonts and linked assets–and even con­tain oth­er placed INDD files. Potentially you could build from placed pages an infi­nite Russian matryosh­ka doll where every placed INDD has inside it anoth­er placed INDD, and inside that is anoth­er INDD, and so on. How far into that nest of link­ing will the pack­age com­mand go? As far as I can tell, all the way. Just for kicks I tried six lev­els deep. Package found and col­lect­ed unique images and fonts used at each lev­el. So, if you have DocA.indd placed inside DocB.indd , File > Package will find all the fonts and linked assets used by DocB.indd. One of those linked assets is DocA.indd, so InDesign will col­lect that and put it into the pack­aged project’s Links fold­er, too. At the same time, InDesign rec­og­nizes that DocA.indd itself has font and asset depen­den­cies, so it grabs all those as well. And, it updates the links in all col­lect­ed INDD files to point to images and oth­er assets in the Links folder.

Placed Page Collaboration Workflow. It just works. Remember where you heard it first.