Read the customer story (PDF, 1.2M)
Company
- The Magazine Group
- Washington, D.C.
- www.themagazinegroup.com
Challenge
- Take custom publishing to the next level by producing more sophisticated designs while streamlining production time and saving money for clients.
Solution
- Use Adobe InDesign CS software and the Adobe Creative Suite to experiment with creative ideas and produce sophisticated layouts.
- Take advantage of prepress and production efficiencies and an Adobe PDF/X-1a workflow to reduce publishing time.
Benefits
- Reduced design time and increased creative experimentation by moving to an integrated suite of applications.
- Cut production time by one-eighth to one-third per project.
Toolkit
- Adobe Acrobat
- Adobe Illustrator CS
- Adobe InDesign CS
- Adobe Photoshop CS
- Apple Power Mac G4 and G5 computers running Mac OS X
The pinnacle of custom publishing
The Magazine Group adopts Adobe InDesign software and the Adobe Creative Suite to help its clients cut through marketing clutter while reducing production time by one-third.
Companies and associations today are tapping consumers' fondness for magazines as a way of cutting through the media clutter to increase brand awareness and loyalty among members. The result is a growing industry — custom magazine publishing — that's offering more sophisticated products than ever before.
One example is the National Hemophilia Foundation's HemAware, a bimonthly magazine packed with medical updates, analysis, professional news, and practical health information for people living with a bleeding disorder and for their care providers. This magazine showcases how custom publishing can deepen relationships within a community by providing useful information in a compelling format.
The company behind "HemAware" magazine's sophisticated layout is The Magazine Group (TMG), one of the largest independent custom publishers in the United States. Each year, TMG produces more than 35 million magazine issues for clients as diverse as the U.S. Department of State and the American Diabetes Association. The company provides custom publishing services including design, editorial, circulation management, advertising sales, and web development to nearly 70 corporations and nonprofit organizations.
Rising above the noise
Cutting through media clutter calls for exceptional design, so it's no surprise that TMG designers and art directors have won numerous industry awards for design and publishing. In November 2004, for example, at the Folio: Show in New York City, TMG won 13 Ozzie Awards, including 4 gold and 7 silver; later that month, the firm received 8 Pearl Awards from the Custom Publishing Council, including 2 gold and 2 silver.
"InDesign® CS is a major advance over other page layout options, especially because of its strengths in multilingual and cross-media publishing. These are important considerations because we publish in a variety of languages and reuse content on the web," says Richard Creighton, principal and founder of The Magazine Group.
To capture customers' attention while increasing publishing productivity, TMG not only maintains a staff of award-winning designers, but the company also has adopted Adobe® InDesign CS software and the other components of the Adobe Creative Suite as its exclusive publishing platform.
From wary to inspired
TMG is converting the layouts of all of its customers' titles to InDesign CS and using it as the standard for building beautiful custom pages. In the past, the company used QuarkXPress for 100% of its page layout needs, but now, TMG is so committed to InDesign and excited about its capabilities that the firm has been conducting seminars to help its customers smoothly transition to the software.
"We were thrilled once we saw what Adobe InDesign could do," says Janelle Welch, art director for The Magazine Group. "We were initially wary because we had so many years invested in using QuarkXPress. Then, we saw the advanced capabilities of InDesign and the power of the integrated Adobe Creative Suite and were inspired to dive in and start designing layouts."
"InDesign CS is a major advance over other page layout options."
principal and founder, The Magazine Group
Converting Washington Flyer to InDesign
Because InDesign shares common tools, palettes, and commands with Adobe Illustrator® CS and Photoshop® CS software, the TMG creative team needed only a few days to familiarize itself with the new software. For projects such as the "Washington Flyer", a bimonthly, four-color travel publication, the transition to InDesign went smoothly and was well worth the effort. The glossy, graphics-rich magazine is distributed at Dulles and Reagan International Airports and boasts a readership of 200,000 business and leisure travelers.
TMG rebuilt the "Washington Flyer" layout within InDesign, a process made easier by the software's high level of support for tables and precise control over shaping of text and photo boxes. The TMG creative team was able to experiment with more ideas simply by turning on and off InDesign layers containing different colors, gradients, drop shadows, and type effects. Tools such as built-in transparency and advanced typographical controls let designers try fresh looks and effects.
The Magazine Group uses InDesign to produce "Washington Flyer", a glossy, graphics-rich magazine distributed to 200,000 business and leisure travelers. Features such as tables, transparency, and sophisticated typographical controls in InDesign enable designers to try fresh looks and effects with ease.
After establishing the layout, the TMG staff began working with the "Washington Flyer" ads. First the prepress staff preflighted the ad files using built-in tools in InDesign that let them check for proper file links, image resolutions, and fonts. The team then converted the files to PDF/X-1a format for placement into InDesign layouts. A simplified Portable Document Format (PDF) standard for reliable data exchange in a prepress environment, PDF/X-1a locks down linked files, proper color profiling, image resolutions, and fonts so that PDF files print predictably and consistently.
According to Scott Bolgiano, TMG prepress manager, although one of the biggest headaches in prepress — especially with ads — used to be missing fonts, that's no longer an issue with InDesign and PDF/X-1a. "We used to spend hours tracking down one font after another," he says. "Now we can see right up front if a font is missing, and it saves tremendous time in the workflow. By using the PDF/X-1a format, we know ads will print reliably, and that's half the battle."
The Magazine Group can produce award-winning designs faster and more easily, thanks to built-in features in InDesign and integration among components of the Adobe Creative Suite.
After preflighting the individual files, the TMG prepress staff checks for fonts, colors, image formats, and print settings across the entire publication and sends Adobe PDF files to the client for final sign-off. Clients use the commenting and markup tools in Adobe Acrobat® software to review files and send their comments and final approval back to TMG. When clients take advantage of the electronic commenting tools in Acrobat, both TMG and clients save substantially on the high cost and time delays associated with hard-copy proofs and overnight delivery services.
Production in one-third less time
Once clients have approved a piece, TMG edits and finalizes the InDesign files and outputs high-resolution, press-ready Adobe PDF files based on specific Acrobat Distiller® settings provided by the company's print service providers. R.R. Donnelley, Cadmus Communications, and United Litho frequently run print jobs for the firm.
From fewer font problems to easier color management, TMG's internal production workflow is greatly streamlined since moving to InDesign. "Our prepress and production groups prefer InDesign files, our web production group prefers them, and so do our print vendors," says TMG Systems Manager George Perikles.
"Our prepress and production groups prefer InDesign files, our web production group prefers them, and so do our print vendors."
systems manager, The Magazine Group
Prepress and output go so much more smoothly that TMG estimates production takes one-eighth to one-third less time since the company moved to InDesign — a tremendous time savings for TMG and its clients. TMG is implementing the same publishing workflow as it did for "Washington Flyer" for all of its customer publications. As of mid-2005, The Magazine Group was producing 60 magazines using InDesign and the other components of the Adobe Creative Suite.
Integration for increased productivity
According to Ken Hansen, head of business development for TMG, the quality of the company's magazine designs hasn't changed substantially since moving to InDesign because TMG has always had award-winning designers on staff who could work wonders with the tools they have had on hand. With InDesign, however, the design staff can build layouts with sophisticated type effects and eye-catching graphics more quickly and easily because the software includes a host of design tools. Having these tools available within InDesign helps remove the barriers to creativity by giving designers more freedom and time to experiment without having to be concerned about the technical details of generating designs. In addition, the integration of InDesign with Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat makes the designer's job easier.
The creative and production teams at The Magazine Group have become more efficient since the company switched to an all Adobe workflow using InDesign and other components of the Adobe Creative Suite. The company estimates that production now takes up to one-third less time than it did with its previous solution.
"Designers can place native Illustrator and Photoshop files into layouts," says Hansen. "They spend less time moving back and forth between applications, editing graphics files and then flattening them for placement into layouts."
Looking to the future, TMG plans to take advantage of support for OpenType® fonts in InDesign, which makes multilingual publishing in non-English languages easier than it's ever been before. The firm also plans to leverage InDesign support for XML to streamline reuse of content on the web.
Meanwhile, The Magazine Group is transitioning the layouts of all of its remaining customer titles to a workflow centered on InDesign and Adobe PDF. Creighton sums up the results for The Magazine Group and its customers in two words: "major improvement."
