Noha began the meeting with the announcement that a Boston chapter founding member, Chris Jones, had moved to Seattle. She introduced Meg Young as the new chapter representative. Meg booked the Auditorium at MassArt for our meeting venue and agreed to act as chapter representative after Chris left.
Meg then introduced Meredith McDowell, Art Director at Xperience and a MassArt graduate who presented how they use InDesign at Xperience on some of their projects. Meredith was accompanied by one of her designers, Anna Soman, also MassArt a alumnus. Meredith and Anna took turns talking about some of their projects and about InDesign has streamlined their work.
Meredith explained that they made the switch from Quark to InDesign when they moved to OS X and that they've never looked back. They are big fans of InDesign. The first project they presented was an internal proposal for Ford. It had a mix of clients and writers, all using different programs and computing platforms. Files came from Word and from Excel for charts and tables. The files were built via copying in and out of Photoshop and Illustrator®.
She explained how InDesign’s interoperabilty with the PDF format enabled them to exchange files with creative directors in New York and Detroit seamlessly and cut down on the necessity of having to travel to those locations for meetings. She also showed some examples of Excel tables brought into InDesign as master pages, and she talked about how easy it was to transfer them back and forth.
Anna then spoke about a recurring newsletter they do for Ford. She imported the layout and stylesheets from Quark into InDesign. Now they have the same monthly template in InDesign. They've even started using PDF for the web, since it is flexible and easy to update.
Other projects included event marketing, web work, large-scale outdoor prints, and product launches. Meredith and Anna both spoke about the ease with which InDesign handles transparency and the layering and masking capabilities of Photoshop. The product launch for the Volvo S40 involved lots of last-minute changes and a very short turnaround time. They described how they handled these challenges with InDesign. They did flyers, a website, and ecards, all with InDesign type treatments that they might have done before with Illustrator. They also described how the Links palette helped them deal with last-minute changes. They could just call up the original with the Links palette and modify it.
Next Anna described a detailed environmental redesign they did for AT&T in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The campaign was for AT&T’s 13 internet data centers around the country. Dealing with AT&T meant many levels of approval for color comps, and enhancing existing palettes, typefaces, textures … all to make the data centers more humane. InDesign made dealing with so many clients seamless; everyone spoke PDF. The project also involved designing for banners, plasma screens, kiosks, table toppers, brochures, websites, rugs, easels, letterhead, pens, and cups, all around the theme of people at work, at play, and in transit. Lots of charts fit in the rest of AT&T’s campaign, again involving color palettes, textures, and typefaces. InDesign was a great tool. Even though the theme graphics for logos were always changing, it was easy copying from Illustrator to InDesign, or updating an embedded glass treatment/mural.
Meredith and Anna also liked how InDesign handled large-scale graphics. They had 18 different airshows for a “Countdown to Kittyhawk” campaign. The panels for this were 4’ x 12’, including the history of Ford and the last 100 years in aviation. Photoshop and InDesign both played a role in prepping these for large format output.
All of the 4’ x 10’ panels for the Sunshine Tour of Ford Lincoln Mercury were in one file. This kept the color consistent and still allowed for switching out photos. They could also grab, group, and shrink photos from the designs to make flyers. On the side of a an 18-wheel truck, they used large vector graphics in Illustrator and InDesign for branding.
Xperience dealt with dealers in Dubai, Singapore, and Puerto Rico for a Ford dealer meeting. They produced all large-scale banners and 60 3’ x 4’ product boards. This involved many international vehicles and photographs. They kept Singapore’s product boards all in one file. Just imagine: 60 3’ x 4’ signs all in different languages! InDesign enabled them to keep everything together, allowing them to maintain the same look and feel for all the design formats.
Xperience deals with printers from all over the country, and had to pressure printers using OS 9 and Quark to make the switch. Printers that finally made the switch have found that they got better print quality with InDesign. They even thanked Xperience for getting them to move to InDesign.
Q: How did you deal with such large files?
A: We burned files to DVD to ship to printers; InDesign made it easy to package, and they averaged around 800 megs.
Q: What’s the best image format?
A: We use JPEGs for comps to Detroit and New York City. We also use CMYK TIFFs and copy-and-paste vector graphics all the time. The golf course graphic we showed was just done in Illustrator and copied into InDesign.
We always have a time crunch, but it’s great to use embedded graphics. Vectors stay vectors when resizing.
Q: Do you do it all in InDesign?
A: Our productive creative partners do; others are Word users.
Q: How do you tackle color management?
A: It’s pretty seamless; we use Pantone colors.
Q: How much training does Xperience do?
A: We don’t! We don’t train, we give them a project. Since most designers have used Quark and everybody has Photoshop and Illustrator experience, they adapt. We have no time to spare!
Q: How long did it take to get comfortable with InDesign?
A: A week, but we keep learning. We’re now comfortable with tables; it’s a great tool to use every day.
Q: How was the switch from Quark? Any issues?
A: Style sheets, character sheets — all came over smoothly.
Q: Are you an all-Mac shop?
A: We’re all Macintosh, except for sales and producers. PDFs make it extremely handy for viewing cross-platform.
Q: How do you use transparencies and PDFs?
A: We use them to show for comps, with screen-capture JPEGs of pages from Photoshop.
