How establishing Adobe workflows puts hours back into your day
It was bittersweet when Susan Langenhennig, my amazing co-worker and friend, left The Times-Picayune in 2018 to be Preservation Resource Center’s Communications Director and Editor of its fantastic magazine Preservation in Print. Susan is one of a kind. She and I worked together for years on InsideOut and Wish, two magazines she edited and produced for The Times-Picayune. Nothing falls through the cracks on her watch and her editorial decisions always have her readers’ best interests in mind. I knew I would miss working with her but I also knew she immediately would do amazing things at PRC and that absolutely has been the case.
Preservation in Print, March 2019 issue.
When I went into business for myself last fall, I was thrilled that she asked me to consult with her team at Preservation in Print to introduce some Adobe workflows to clean up their editorial processes and get back some valuable time they were losing during production.
Here’s what we hoped to fix:
Get everyone on one system. All the text in the magazine was given to the talented Liz Jurey in Microsoft Word files. That’s not the worst thing if you know the text won’t change. As a matter of fact, the majority of my clients give me project text as Word files. But when it comes to publications, particularly periodicals, this gets cumbersome as any text changes then have to be dictated to a designer. Or if there are several changes, often a new file will have to be sent over. Any text styling done by a designer then will be wiped out when a new version is placed on a page. It’s a frustrating whitewashing of a canvas that adds hours to production. Another hurdle to their production process was that only one user could be working on the document at any given time. If Susan got into pages to make corrections, that would mean Liz would have to step aside and wait until Susan was finished. It was costing both of them valuable time. Just giving Susan the ability to create articles, edit and style text would free up Liz to work on other tasks.
Use templates when possible. The magazine has plenty of recurring features in each issue that have a standard look and feel that could really benefit from design and text templates. It didn’t mean that Liz would lose the ability to make any design tweaks but rather would give her a head start, placing all the common elements on a page, saving her the work of starting from scratch month to month. A text template would give Susan the option of giving Liz a basic framework for an article, including photos, headlines and any related assets.
We looked to accomplish three tasks in our project:
Use Adobe Creative Cloud, essentially creating our own version of a content management system to facilitate the back-and-forth editing and design that happens during production. Articles would be created in Adobe InCopy. Susan could then edit all aspects of a package, including headlines, captions, infoboxes, and of course, the story itself. Liz would continue to use Adobe InDesign. Rather than saving files locally on a user’s computer or server, the issue would now be saved on Creative Cloud. This process eliminates the down time one user would experience while another user was working in the issue file.
Create templates for standing features in each issue to keep Liz from having to re-create those pages each issue. We’d create a basic story template that would allow Susan to work ahead on articles when possible, and to attach any visual assets, adding type styles to speed up the process for Liz, and to give both users an early preview of what the page will look like.
Create an Adobe Creative Cloud library to store and share assets. It also allowed me to quickly send or modify templates I made for Liz.
Any new processes are likely to have some bumps and that was the case for us here, too. Getting used to sharing files over the cloud vs. locally was an adjustment. We encountered some connectivity issues that sometimes gave us some interesting errors regarding Creative Cloud libraries or syncing. We also had kinks in some templates that needed tweaks, or in some cases, to be remade. We also found that some pretty essential toolbars and palettes didn’t show up for Susan or for me in the newest versions of InCopy, but going back a version or two in InCopy seemed to do the trick.
The most troublesome snag we still have is the existence of instances of a “conflicted copy” of InDesign files. It appears to be something Adobe users have experienced for years and it doesn’t seem there is a magic fix available. The risk of losing hours of work is the biggest downfall of these “conflicted copies,” and constantly being on the lookout for them slows you down. I experience these errors in some of my other projects and it never ceases to frustrate me. I’ve looked around online for answers and reached out to Adobe users on the Twittersphere but haven’t received any responses. If you know the answer, please, please tell me!
After a few months, we’re ready to call the project complete. Would a system like this help your publication? Let’s get together and make it happen!