Ready for Layout

McCann-Erickson is sold on a transition to Adobe InDesign.McCann-Erickson, reportedly the world's largest advertising agency, must be one tough customer for vendors pitching new wares, right?Well, yes and no. Sure, the agency demands top quality, performance and value from any investment, but it's also always on the lookout for emerging goods and services that might give the company a competitive edge.McCann-Erickson's New York City creative and production studio is especially aggressive in regard to technology investigation and implementation. "Our philosophy has been to drive issues and solutions," states Warren Vegas, vice president and production studio manager. "When we see a technology [with great potential], we like to be involved with its development from the ground floor. We want to drive it so it'll do what we want it to do."A prime example of the agency's preference for the driver's seat, as well as its desire to forge close partnerships with its vendors, is its ongoing involvement with InDesign, the new page layout and design program from Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA. Driving InDesignThe New York City studio began testing InDesign when the software was in its early beta stages. "We've been playing with [InDesign] for about a year and a half," Vegas reports. "We worked on K2 [which became version 1.0] and will help with future versions. We've given Adobe a lot of input throughout the process."McCann-Erickson was immediately receptive to the idea of InDesign because, Vegas explains, "With the exception of Quark-XPress for page layout, everything else we use [for ad creation] is from Adobe: Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat." The agency's decision to test the new product was based on its success with other Adobe offerings, its interest in achieving tighter integration among those programs (and increased productivity overall) and its strong relationship with the Adobe organization.The Adobe sales representative with whom Vegas deals provided the initial tipoff about InDesign's debut. "He said that [Adobe CEO and Chairman] John Warnock was going to give a speech on new technologies at an upcoming trade show, and that I might be interested in what [Warnock] had to say," Vegas recalls. The rep was right. "As soon as I saw the preview version [of InDesign], I knew that when Adobe started doing alpha and beta sites we wanted to be a part of it," he declares. First impressionsVegas learned the program, then trained the studio's designers on the beta version. "Using InDesign was weird at first," he admits, "but it became much easier very quickly." Designers accustomed to Quark-XPress will find differences between the page layout solutions—and must adapt accordingly—but the learning curve is minimized, Vegas contends, because InDesign has the same "feel" as other commonly used Adobe software.For example, he points out, designers use the option key to move around in QuarkXPress, but InDesign uses the space bar, as do most other graphics programs. "There are Quark keyboard shortcuts for InDesign, but I tell designers not to use them because they're only a crutch," Vegas notes."When they start working with InDesign, designers say, 'Oh, this works just like Illustrator and Photoshop,' " he reports. "Ninety-nine percent of designers are Photoshop people anyway, and we're finding that the best Photoshop people do really well with InDesign. "Plus, Photoshop and Illustrator people are used to working with InDesign features such as layers, which [facilitates] the transition," he continues. "Conversely, people were able to work better in Illustrator—even if they weren't very familiar with the program—once they learned InDesign."Waiting for what's nextThe agency plans to make the actual switch from XPress to InDesign after Adobe releases the next version of InDesign, scheduled to ship soon. "Everyone's been trained and is ready for the shift: I've given them all the articles and books I could find about the program, and we've started to work on some ads," Vegas relates. "But, we haven't done a lot [of live jobs] so far," he adds. "We're waiting for more InDesign plug-ins [for making crop marks and custom job slugs, as well as for resizing], which should come out this quarter, and we want to be sure that our engravers and separators are up to speed." (McCann-Erickson's New York City studio sends ads to its prepress vendors as application files.)Version 1.0 al-ready offers a lot of great features, Vegas claims, such easy import of graphics from other programs. "If you want to bring an image into InDesign from Photoshop, you don't have to save it as an EPS. You can just drag and drop it." Other time savers include multi-line composing, optical kerning, and the ability to save and place PDFs."Our people want to be focused on doing their work," Vegas stresses. "We don't want to have to worry about file formats or kerning. If I save a file as a PDF, it shouldn't be a 40-step process. The program should take care of mundane tasks, and that's what InDesign does."But, InDesign doesn't do it all—yet. "We pointed out certain things missing from version 1.0 that we need for advertising and one-offs," Vegas reveals. He expects the next version to improve on 1.0 with the inclusion of enhancements such as an eyedropper tool, drag-and-drop color, better font usage, transparency capabilities, drop shadows and printer style sheets. "My biggest complaint about 1.0 was that the architecture saves time, but you can lose it again through less-than-ideal implementations," he remarks.Playing the percentagesVegas calculates that the studio will increase its productivity by 30 percent after making the full transition to InDesign, "just because it'll be easier to do stuff. … Now we have to create a Photoshop document, flatten the image, then save the graphics as an EPS to work with it in XPress."That's a 10-minute process," he declares. With InDesign, he points out, not only do you save time, but you streamline your workflow because you're not storing two or more versions of each file. The transition should allow McCann to clear out some clutter from its servers.While Vegas expects to realize immediate benefits with the new layout program, he believes there's room for more improvement. For example, he'd like to see a future upgrade allow for variable page size, which would be valuable when doing an ad that has creep or gatefolds. "Acrobat allows users to define ad size, bleed size and trim size," he notes. "I want to be able to do that in InDesign, so that when I export from PDF, I can export to the trim."In the meantime, he's confident that Adobe is heading in the right direction with InDesign. "Page layout is the one last part of our workflow that hasn't been optimized," Vegas concludes. "This completes the workflow." -Dawn Greenlaw

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