Feed On Me

So I hit this one usually everyday. It is pretty common. I talk to and visit customers and witness environments, weather it is an Advertising Agency, a Corporate Marketing Communications, a print shop, and any other production art site, is that they have outgrown their workflow.

Lets say, I’m in a situation where this advertising or marketing agency may design, create and layout some circular ads. You, know the ads for a retailer that you get in your Sunday paper. They have been working the way they’ve been working for over ten years. They may have an image editing or color correcting department that has been preparing images and they have designers and production artists that create and assemble pages or spreads that build the publication. They have been doing this the way they’ve been doing it way they have been for years, and using the same tools.

The following will be a couple things to consider if you’ve outgrown your workflow and would like to build a more efficient and more productive workflow. Most of this may be pretty basic, but is sometimes forgotten.

1) If you are upgrading hardware, look at wiring and networking as well. So many times a workgroup will get screaming fast new Quad G5s or now new Mac Pros for new workstations. Look at the server and other hardware tool. How old is that crappy 10baseT HUB under the corner cubicle? If you have the budget, look at going gigbit throughout, now that your new workstations and hopefully new server support it. You’ll see dramatic improvements all around

2) Look at the age and cleanliness of your files. I know that you may have thousands of previous docs lying around, but it’s time to weed out and rebuild the old. Face it. Some of your spreads, pages or layouts were created in lets say, QuarkXPress 3.32, and saved again in 4.11, and then opened and saved in Ver 5, or version 6.5, now you may be ungrading to version 7 of QuarkXPress. There is a whole mess of code crammed in that there file. You may have stock images that you masked out the background using a clipping path that you did in 1993. Ouch! That was back in Photoshop 4! It is a good idea to resave many of your “Legacy” art files with a newer version of your fav image editing app. And if you were migrating from Mac OS9, to Mac OSX There is a a lot of craziness that can happen. (another time, another post)

A couple tips for opening up those legacy QuarkXPress docs, whith your current app open, use the file>open command and navigate to the file and while opening the doc, hold down the option key. This will rebuild the file stucture of that doc and make for a happy file again. Another thing you can do, is do the good ‘ol thumbnail drag technique. Where, when you have a legacy doc open create a new one to the exact same size and then view both docs as thumbnails, now you can just drag and drop the pages with all the content into your newly created doc, and then just delete the empty pages.

3)Look at newer features. Some features that may dramatically improve the way you work. I’m all about effeciency. If I can save a few seconds, but a hundered time a day I feel more productive. Like, for instance in the newly released QuarkXPress 7 Has support for not only placing native Photoshop Docutments with all the layers and channels, but you can also place images with embedded alpha channel masks as well. (I’ll hit on Alpha Channels in a future post) So you would no longer need to draw clipping paths, and work with a native PSD (photoshop doc) and save down as a flat eps or tiff with the clipping path embedded. You could use just the one file. The PSD that you could mask areas off using alpha channels also within tiffs. These are just a few things to think about, and there are a lot time saving things you can do do your workflow.

I’ll hit more on workflow later. I’ll try and keep it going in a series, maybe. I’ll try and work some podcasts into it as well. I’m a visual person, so video how-tos are always cool.