Special Report Printing, Paper & Production
"During this time," he continues, "the clipped and cleaned images — as well as the physical products — are sent to our prepress professionals who color correct the images and return them to us on DVD for final placement into the document."
The final InDesign pages are preflighted, converted to PDFs (Adobe's Portable Document Format), and sent to the printer for impositioning, color proofing and, finally, platemaking. The final pages also are archived on DVDs at Logomark.
The Logomark Legacy
While Logomark's digital workflow is highly effective for producing quality results on press, there remained a wrinkle in the process that Lazarus
wanted to resolve — how best to deal with legacy content. For many years, he explains, Logomark's design and production team relied on QuarkXPress for its layout needs — until Adobe's InDesign came along.
"We switched from Quark 6.5 to InDesign 4.02 in July 2005, after extensive research," he recalls. "We now use Adobe Creative Suite 2 exclusively."
One of the primary reasons Logomark made the transition to InDesign was because of its tight integration with Adobe's other tools that collectively make up the Creative Suite — specifically, Photoshop and Illustrator.
"InDesign is the core software for everything we do," Lazarus explains. "Ninety percent of our studio's work lands in InDesign, with elements created in Illustrator and Photoshop."
While he's pleased with the transition to the new application, it did present somewhat of a challenge, considering the company's large library of legacy QuarkXPress documents, which occasionally are repurposed for new print projects. So he looked for a reliable method for bringing these legacy documents — or the elements within them — into InDesign.
He found an inexpensive plug-in tool called Q2ID (stands for Quark to InDesign) from Santa Ana, Calif.-based Markzware Software. Q2ID is a plug-in for Macintosh-based Adobe InDesign (versions 3 and 4) that allows users to open QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, simply by using InDesign's File>Open command. The software tool promises to convert most of the elements in a QuarkXPress document to a native InDesign format, including page positioning, color models, fonts and styles, images, and text attributes.
