As the publishing world continues to converge with digital media, one of the companies at the forefront of this change is Adobe Systems Inc. And if you haven’t already done so, now would be a great time to convert to the Adobe Creative Suite. This article will focus on InDesign, and future articles will address other applications in CS3.

In early 2007, Newsday converted to InDesign. I was concerned at the time because we had thousands of legacy documents and all of our staff had been using Quark Inc.’s QuarkXPress for 10-plus years. They knew Quark so well that they didn’t have to think about it.

There were many questions about converting: How were we going to do it? What about all the integrations to legacy systems? And how large would the learning curve be?

Now, one year later, I can report that I’m glad we made the conversion when we did. My only regret? I wish we would have done it sooner.

Training key

For us, I can’t emphasize enough how important it was to bring in a professional trainer. There are plenty of Adobe-certified trainers around the country and you should find one who suits your newspaper’s needs. We were very fortunate to find Jennifer Pade from Flux Consulting (www.fluxconsulting.com) in Manhattan. Pade has helped convert a number of publications to InDesign.

Our designers connected with Jennifer and she used a lot of their work during the training. We maxed out the classes at eight designers and conducted morning and afternoon sessions so no one would get overloaded. Once they saw what could be done in InDesign, they never looked back.



This printed piece shows the use of the transparency setting
available directly within the InDesign CS3 program.
 

A sample use of the drop shadow feature available in the InDesign CS3 software.

Pick firm date to convert

One of my managers made a great point when she said, “We have to let them use these new tools now.” She picked a firm date and from that point forward everything would be done in InDesign. This was such a critical decision because it’s difficult to go back and forth between a current page layout application and InDesign. The only way to get all the designers up to speed fast is to let them use the application in daily production. Our conversion was completed within six weeks of the training.

Creative and production benefits

I don’t have enough space to outline all of the benefits of converting to InDesign. For designers it’s a whole new world. Applying advanced effects (drop shadows, wrapping text, selecting colors from an image, transparencies) often requires just a click of the mouse. In many cases, you never have to leave InDesign to apply these creative effects. Now that a year has passed, the designers often comment that they don’t know how they did things before InDesign.

The benefits on the production side are equally great. The ability to embed art and have it travel with the InDesign document has been very helpful.  In fact, it’s been so beneficial that we turned off OPI and adapted a new workflow that includes working with the high-resolution artwork (note: with all these new tools in InDesign, you’ll most likely want to work with the high-resolution art).

Full-color management capabilities and the ability to make PDFs directly  from InDesign are huge time savers. Designers working in a fully color-managed workflow can now see accurate color from their monitors all the way to the press.

And speaking of time savers, InDesign is fully scriptable. If you can dream it, you can probably script it in InDesign. We have several AppleScripts currently in production and they’re saving us a lot of time.

Strategic reasoning

Maybe the single most important reason for converting now is strategic. Getting your newspaper ready for the future is going to have to include the Creative Suite. The suite now includes InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash. Who knows what else it will it include in the future? Will the tools be more powerful and even more integrated with the Web? Count on it. Adobe will make advances that we can’t even imagine at the moment, and you want to have your folks trained and working in the programs that have become the industry standard. Are you ready to convert?

James Kober is the prepress area manager for Newsday in Long Island, N.Y.  You can e-mail him your questions and comments at jkober@newsday.com.