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© 2000 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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Deb Krisko is a CorelWORLD alumna three times over, so when she approached us about redesigning her company’s newsletter, we knew we had to do a good job. Furthermore, there was talk of turning this quarterly over to QuarkXPress if Ventura Publisher couldn’t hack it. Fortunately, it did…with aplomb. This article chronicles our journey.
“We need your help producing our newsletter,” came the innocent-sounding remark. “We use Ventura, but our DTP person doesn’t use tags.”
As any veteran user will agree, that’s a bit like stirring a tall drink with a toothpick. Not quite the right tool for the job. But when Deb Krisko of Hitchcock Industries told us that the alternative was to switch to QuarkXPress, we wasted no time telling her that Hitchcock was already using the right software, just not in the right way. Hitchcock asked us to produce it properly, and we knew that we were at the all-important fork in the road: Hitchcock would either stay in the Ventura fold, or leave. And that decision rested entirely on our performance in making over the company’s quarterly newsletter.
To say that the Hitchcock Spotlight was designed poorly would be a bit unfair. It wasn’t designed at all. And to say that the company’s DTP staff used Ventura 8 would also be subject to interpretation, seeing how the entire product was created with tag overrides, and some of the pages featured as many frames as paragraphs. Indeed, Hitchcock might as well have been using PageMaker…
Figure 1, above, shows the lackluster cover that greeted employees each quarter. The spotlight idea was well-intentioned, but its execution flawed with poor contrast, a barely-recognizable logo, and a muddy fountain-filled background. Also, the cover tells us what is inside, but not where.
Once you move inside, you are immediately struck—okay, overcome—by the newsletter’s use of white space. This is because, as Figure 2 shows above, the white space is present between each paragraph. You’ll note the use of four distinct formats for text—the department headline, the story headline, the byline, and the body copy. However, only one tag was used, and with tag overrides being used for all formatting, there was no hope at all of a consistent design.
It became clear to us immediately that a makeover would not be in order. The Spotlight needed a teardown—we would start from scratch. Moreover, we recommend teardowns for almost all inherited Ventura projects. When you start from scratch, you become much more familiar with the project than when you take over for someone else.
We like to do the following:
1. Open the existing publication, so we have access to the tags and formats used, for reference.
2. Create all new tags, using a naming scheme in which each tag begins with an “&”. That way, all of our new tags show up at the top of the Tag list.
3. Gradually replace the old tags with new ones (when you remove a tag, you can designate which tag those paragraphs should inherit).
Decision No. 1 was the grid—a concept completely lost in prior efforts. We decided to create a three-column grid with a “scholar’s margin” on the outside. The outside column would be used for photos, captions, callouts, or nothing. Figure 3 shows the page tag that we created for it, with frames on the outside columns to contain text flow to the inside of each page.
We created two other page tags: One for the front page—which was similar to the default pages, save for the vertical masthead consuming the left column—and one for photo spreads and layouts—essentially a big, empty page. With simplicity as our mantra, we were determined that if readers were going to criticize the new look, they weren’t going to claim that it was overdesigned or ugly.
Hitchcock was publishing the newsletter in four-color and had the hefty print bills to show for it. We insisted the company could get a better-looking newsletter and publish in just two colors; they weren’t about to say no to that. So we chose black and good ol’ Reflex Blue, and proceeded to create a color palette for the job.
We actually used Cyan to represent the Reflex—we do this regularly, as we often find it easier to work with a process color than a Pantone color (and the people at your print shop do not care what it says on the film—they’ll use whatever ink you tell them to). Figure 4 shows the palette we created for the job; note that we called Cyan 100% Reflex—you can name a color anything you want when you create your own palette.
We wanted to move as far away as we could from ransom note publishing (we counted seven different typefaces in the original design), so we designated that all body copy—including headlines, subheads, bylines, drop capitals, and callouts—would be set in Adobe Garamond. That’s one face with which we think you can just never go wrong.
We chose Eras for accents (it is a sans serif that is almost italic—just leaning forward a bit), and applied it to the masthead, department heads (reversed out of a solid blue bar), and folio lines along the bottom. Figure 5 shows how these two faces interplay.
In addition to the drab colors of the original cover, we were not thrilled with the lack of content. Certainly, there must be something going on each quarter at Hitchcock that is front-page news! Indeed, we convinced the bosses to designate one article each quarter for the cover of the newsletter, and now we felt much more comfortable designing it.
After the relatively dull color scheme used previously, we went for bright and high-contrast, using fully-saturated blues and solid whites. We bled the masthead off of the left side, and a teaser off of the right side, leading readers into the interior pages. Figure 6 shows our efforts.
One area of confusion in the earlier design was where one article ended and the next one began. Therefore, we insisted upon end-of-file markers, using the Hitchcock logo. A simple anchoring trick can ensure that the marker always follows the last line of text:
1. Create a tag called Article End, or some such name that fits the purpose.
2. Go to Paragraph | Paragraph Tag Properties.
3. From the Breaks page of that dialog, set its Line break to be After and check In Line with Previous Paragraph.
4. From the Align page, check Add Width of Previous Line, and then add about six to 12 points of additional indent. OK the dialog.
5. Position your cursor at the end of the article, press Enter to create one empty paragraph, and tag that paragraph with your new Article End tag.
6. Import the logo into a small frame and anchor that frame to the blank Article End paragraph.
Now that logo will always follow dutifully behind the last paragraph.
Hitchcock likes to honor its employees who have reached milestones of employment or have recently retired, so lots of photos are taken. We had good luck scanning and placing these photos. We were tempted to print them in the second color, but referring back to our mantra of simplifying whenever possible, we resisted. However, we did make liberal use of sidebars, separated from regular copy by their lightly-shaded backgrounds.
All in all, we were adamant—almost aggressive—in our stance of simple pages and clean lines. It’s almost as if we were saying, “Yes, we could have added more elements to this page, but we intentionally didn’t.”
Before and after PDF files are available here. The BEFORE is a 900K file, while the AFTER is less than 300K. Another benefit to adhering to clean and uncluttered designs…
We knew that somebody with less-than-expert skills would be responsible for the newsletter’s quarterly production, and this influenced how we structured the publication. We created Text and Artwork subfolders in the Newsletter folder, and placed all photos, graphics, and text into the proper places.
We chose recognizable names for them—such as president.txt, sports.eps, retirement.txt—and designated that all text be stored externally as plain text files (i.e., Export on Save activated, ANSI chosen as format). That way, as new copy comes in for each subsequent quarter, the editor need only name it properly and place it in the correct folder. Upon opening the .vp file, Ventura will find the new text and place it in the correct location.
This introduces a few archival issues, because if you overwrite new text on top of old text, all earlier publications will be rendered inaccurate. Therefore, we created the following post-publication maneuver:
1. Round up all graphics, text, and the .vp file, and copy them to a .zip archive.
2. Copy the .vp file to the next quarter’s name (e.g., copy q2-2000.vp to q3-2000.vp).
3. Open the newly-published .vp file (q2-2000.vp).
4. Embed everything—all graphics and all text.
5. Save and exit.With these five steps, you ensure three important things:You have a complete backup of the publication, exactly as it was produced, stored safely within a .zip file.
You can get a good jump on producing next quarter’s publication simply by opening the new .vp file (q3-2000.vp).
For quick reference or for grabbing various elements, you can open the .vp file in which you embedded all the objects.We also created a library of various knick- knacks and doo-dads, like the photo of the president, the end-of-file marker, generic clip art, etc.
We think the employees appreciated the cleaner, easier-to-read look, and we’re pretty sure that Hitchcock’s accountants appreciated the reduced print bill. With any luck, the net result is one more organization choosing to stay in the Ventura camp…
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