Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

Optimizing a $200 million workflow with InCopy CS2 in 7 days.

In addi­tion to pub­lish­ing Quark VS InDesign​.com, arti­cles and books for oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, and free­lance design and pub­lish­ing, I am a cre­ative work­flow opti­miz­er. In the sim­plest of terms, I’m a con­sul­tant who comes into your shop, stu­dio, agency, or office, exam­ines what you do and how you do it, and helps you and your staff make your work­flow more effi­cient, cost-effective, and creative.

InCopy has been a key ele­ment in sev­er­al work­flow trans­for­ma­tions and opti­miza­tions I have exe­cut­ed. This is a case study of one such work­flow optimization.

The Client

The Omega Industrial Environs (not the com­pa­ny’s real name) work­flow includes design­ers lay­ing out graph­i­cal­ly rich 250–600 page pro­pos­al books, brochures, and DVD-hosted web con­tent that include edi­to­r­i­al con­tent from a team of pro­pos­al writ­ers; finan­cial charts, graphs, and tables from the account­ing team, and; floor­plans, maps, and schemat­ics from the engi­neer­ing and archi­tec­ture teams. With copy, finan­cial data, and even tech­ni­cal draw­ings chang­ing through­out the pro­pos­al process up to the very last moment, the exist­ing Omega Industrial Environs work­flow put tremen­dous strain on the Design depart­ment to con­stant­ly update and revise large por­tions of the bound pro­pos­al books.

A few months ago, I was brought in to opti­mize the Omega work­flow. By opti­miz­ing the work­flow with com­pre­hen­sive staff edu­ca­tion and solu­tion deploy­ment, includ­ing the migra­tion from Microsoft Word to Adobe InCopy CS2, I helped Omega remove the bur­den of updat­ing oth­er depart­ments’ con­tent from the shoul­ders of the cre­ative team, dras­ti­cal­ly speed­ing the pro­pos­al gen­er­a­tion process and leav­ing the cre­atives and all per­son­nel to focus on what they do best. In the process, over­time hours con­sumed by the Design depart­ment plum­met­ed from an aver­age of 770 per pro­pos­al to 50.

Although the name of the com­pa­ny and cer­tain details of this case study have been altered to pre­serve con­fi­den­tial­i­ty and “Omega’s” com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, it is based upon an actu­al work­flow opti­miza­tion at a real company.

The Specs

Personnel: Design: 3 print design­ers, 1 print and Web design­er; Copywriting: 3 peo­ple; Accounting: 2 peo­ple; Engineering: 4 peo­ple, and; 1 project manager.

The client depart­ments and per­son­nel (leg­end for flow charts).

Deliverables: Offset- and digitally-printed detailed and graphically-rich 250–600 page bound pro­pos­al books, as well as brochures and DVD-hosted Web content.

Output: InDesign CS-native .INDD lay­outs and .INBK InDesign book files and their assets (TIFF, EPS, PDF).

Incoming Document Assets: Copywriting: Microsoft Word .DOC; Accounting: Microsoft Word .DOC and Microsoft Excel .XLS; Engineering: Microsoft Access (con­vert­ed to XML), Microsoft Visio (con­vert­ed to PDF), and AutoCad and oth­er CAD and schemat­ic file for­mats (con­vert­ed to PDF, TIFF, or EPS for­mats), and; Design: InDesign .INDD doc­u­ments, and Photoshop and Illustrator doc­u­ments (con­vert­ed to PDF, TIFF, EPS).

Systems Environment: Design and Project Manager: Macintosh OS 10.4; Copywriting: Divided between Macintosh OS 10.4 and Windows 2000; Accounting and Engineering: Windows XP Professional.

The Problem

Issue 1: Omega’s pro­pos­al gen­er­a­tion work­flow con­sists of four depart­ments and a project man­ag­er work­ing con­cur­rent­ly to pro­duce content- and design-rich long doc­u­ments on tight dead­lines. During the process con­tent from three of the depart­ments fre­quent­ly changes, and is pro­vid­ed to the fourth depart­ment, Design, which must just as fre­quent­ly change and proof the lay­out to reflect the updat­ed con­tent. All depart­ments work in dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that have lit­tle (if any) auto­mat­ed inte­gra­tion. This process is inef­fi­cient, error-prone, and results in sub­stan­tial and unnec­es­sary work hours per proposal.

Accounting, Copywriting, and Engineering depart­ments all work in dis­parate, best-of-breed appli­ca­tions inde­pen­dent­ly of one anoth­er. As they draft, revise, and final­ize their respec­tive por­tions of the pro­pos­al, they feed each ver­sion to the Design depart­ment for lay­out with­in InDesign CS. As Design receives each updat­ed asset, they place it into the in-progress lay­out and export PDFs from InDesign to ini­ti­ate PDF-based reviews with con­tent authors. PDFs are e‑mailed to des­ti­na­tion depart­ments, who mark-up the PDF and return it–often with replace­ment assets–via e‑mail or sneak­er net to the Design depart­ment. Design affects the changes, includ­ing import­ing and re-formatting new assets, exports new PDFs, and sends them out for a sub­se­quent round of review.

The Problem – all con­tent, revi­sions, and proof­ing flow through the designers.

Simultaneous with man­ag­ing the proof­ing, review, and update of exist­ing pages, Design cre­ates new pages as well as illus­tra­tions and oth­er cre­ative assets not pro­vid­ed by oth­er depart­ments. The Omega design­ers report sig­nif­i­cant dif­fi­cul­ty con­cen­trat­ing on cre­at­ing con­tent due to the fre­quent changes and proofs required by oth­er depart­ments. The salaried cre­atives also incur over­time in excess of 20 hours per week, per employ­ee dur­ing the pro­pos­al cre­ation process.

Issue 2: Content changes may include the addi­tion, sub­trac­tion, or relo­ca­tion of sev­er­al dozen pages–often at the last minute. Not only do such changes cause text to reflow, but the Design depart­ment must also go back through the doc­u­ment mov­ing all accom­pa­ny­ing assets and chang­ing align­ment of objects and text that swaps between left- and right-read pages (for exam­ple, a side­bar text frame in the out­side mar­gin must be man­u­al­ly repo­si­tioned to fol­low its to main text sto­ry to which it belongs).

Issue 3: The Design depart­ment is Mac-based, as is the project man­ag­er, while all oth­er depart­ments in the pro­pos­al work­flow work on Windows. All depart­ments active­ly work, to vary­ing degrees, on their own cre­ative con­tent, and are eager to par­tic­i­pate more in the lay­out process. The Copywriting depart­ment, for exam­ple, typ­i­cal­ly assists in the selec­tion of site and con­struc­tion photographs.

Accounting, Copywriting, and Engineering depart­ments all work in dis­parate, best-of-breed appli­ca­tions that lack more than import/export inte­gra­tion with the Design depart­men­t’s InDesign CS, Illustrator CS, and Photoshop CS. Often non-importable for­mats are pro­vid­ed to Design for con­ver­sion to com­pat­i­ble assets. Additionally, even non-design per­son­nel who could or would assist with the lay­out process are pro­hib­it­ed from doing so by the incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of their fonts and oper­at­ing systems.

Between the two types of fonts avail­able, PostScript Type 1 and TrueType, the Design depart­ment has stan­dard­ized its library to the high­er qual­i­ty Type 1. Type 1 fonts are not cross-platform, and even par­al­lel, oper­at­ing system-specific ver­sions, result in text reflow and glyph sub­sti­tu­tion when InDesign and oth­er cre­ative files, which are cross-platform, move between Windows and Mac com­put­ers. As a result, oth­er depart­ments that could relieve Design of some of the bur­den, are unable to ren­der assis­tance due to plat­form and font incompatibilities.

Additionally, sev­er­al non-creative mem­bers of the team have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how to install and man­age fonts (both Macintosh and Windows sys­tem users).

The Solution

The pro­pos­al work­flow was already as effi­cient as the Omega team could make it with their exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy, which was only recent­ly out­dat­ed. Specifically:

• All pro­pos­al lay­outs and assets are stored on, and opened from, a cen­tral serv­er repository.
• Both InDesign lay­outs and cor­re­spond­ing Word doc­u­ments are based on a stan­dard­ized style sheet, reduc­ing the restyling work every time the Design depart­ment must re-place updat­ed Word doc­u­ments from oth­er depart­ments. The outline-like styles remain aes­thet­i­cal­ly the same in Word from pro­pos­al to pro­pos­al, while style def­i­n­i­tions are altered in InDesign.
• Hardcopy proof­ing and review had long ago been aban­doned in favor of PDF-based reviews using Acrobat 6 Professional on all desktops.
• Dynamic con­tent is stored in a network-accessible Microsoft Access data­base, and export­ed via script­ed com­mand to XML for man­u­al import into InDesign.
• DVD-hosted Web con­tent is cre­at­ed effi­cient­ly in GoLive CS (move to GoLive CS2 is pend­ing) by com­bin­ing pack­aged con­tent from InDesign (uti­liz­ing InDesign’s Package for GoLive fea­ture), Word, Excel, and Access con­tent export­ed to XML, and ImageReady-based batch con­ver­sion of dig­i­tal image content.

Solution to Issue 1:

• Upgrade the Design depart­ment to Adobe InDesign CS 2.
• Replace Microsoft Word with Adobe InCopy CS2 in all departments.
• Institute assignments-based col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow allow­ing non-linear, con­cur­rent work in all departments.
• Eliminate the PDF-based review in favor of live collaboration.
• Leverage exist­ing skills to dis­till dis­parate, non-integrating appli­ca­tions’ out­put files into workflow-compatible assets at the con­tent cre­ator cre­ation phase instead of requir­ing con­ver­sion in Design department.

Solution to Issue 2: Anchored objects, object styles, and align to spine features.

Solution to Issue 3:

• Convert all fonts to cross-platform OpenType.
• Install hands-off, server-side font man­age­ment and activation.

The Execution

The first step was up-training the Design depart­ment from InDesign CS to their recent­ly pur­chased InDesign CS2.