LPK Inc.

Thinking big

"World's largest employee-owned brand design agency standardizes on the Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign CS software to streamline worldwide workflow"

LPK didn't get to be the world's largest employee-owned brand design agency by thinking small. On the contrary, every day successful brands like IBM, Pantene, Pampers, Olay, Hershey's, Valvoline, Quicken, Heinz, AT&T, Hallmark, and Kellogg's pay LPK to think big.

Applying the same client-focused, visionary approach to its own internal processes and tools, LPK standardized on the Adobe® Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign® CS software across all of its offices, encompassing more than 300 people in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland.

"Identity and branding are all about keeping people in the creative flow," says Robert Remley, chief technology officer for LPK. "We started looking at InDesign in 2004 because of its exceptional creative tools and integration with other components of the Adobe Creative Suite. It's hard to overestimate how important it is for our designers to stay inventive versus worrying about technical hassles like what format a file needs to be in for placement into a layout."

Democratizing page layout

In addition to keeping designers in the creative zone, Remley discovered that an all Adobe workflow would enable staff to create a library of reusable branding assets. For example, the ability to place native Adobe Illustrator® CS and Photoshop® CS files into InDesign layouts makes it easy for designers to cut and paste everything from bottle shapes to logos into assembled materials such as coupons, inserts, and in-store displays.

"InDesign CS has been incredibly easy for designers here to master. All of our page layout bottlenecks have been removed because everyone has readily adopted InDesign CS."

—Robert Remley
chief technology officer, LPK

InDesign CS was also easier to master than its page layout rival. Prior to switching to InDesign CS, only a finite number of people at the agency had the technical wherewithal to master the agency's page layout application. Designers would often create hand-drawn sketches and hand them off to the page layout experts for execution. This process often caused crucial bottlenecks if the page assembly "gurus" were unavailable. To overcome this issue, the agency needed an intuitive software tool that could be used by any member of the creative staff.

These initial considerations prompted LPK to make a worldwide agency switch to InDesign CS and the Adobe Creative Suite. To facilitate the transition to the new software, LPK developed a custom online teaching tool to accompany the help guides packaged with InDesign CS. The agency also singled out ten-person groups to help teach the program at each office. Converting old layouts to InDesign CS format was one of the largest concerns; however, the conversion process worked seamlessly, and there were very few issues.

An all Adobe workflow makes it easy for LPK staff to reuse branding assets such as logos and bottle shapes. For example, designers can take a product photograph, manipulate the image in Photoshop, and place the Photoshop file into different InDesign layouts to produce coupons, inserts, and in-store displays.

"InDesign CS has been incredibly easy for designers here to master," says Remley. "All of our page layout bottlenecks have been removed because everyone has readily adopted InDesign CS."

Streamlining the workflow

InDesign CS removed other critical workflow barriers. Because the agency's previous page layout application made overlaying intricate type treatments onto Illustrator artwork difficult, designers had to turn to layout and illustration experts, who were often booked in advance. Now that designers have the ability to place native Illustrator CS files into InDesign CS layouts, they can easily implement anything they imagine all on their own. Designers working on the Pantene brand, for example, can cut and paste bottle shapes for hair color products, the Pantene logo, and other elements and place them directly into layouts of everything from inserts to in-store display materials.

LPK's preflighting process has improved considerably as well because InDesign CS gives users the ability to collect linked files and fonts. With the agency's previous software, this process was less automated and accessible, making it more difficult to prepare files for production and increasing the chances of ensuing print errors.

Integration with Adobe PDF, standardization prove key

LPK has found the ease and speed of outputting InDesign layouts as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files to be another boon. One of the agency's biggest clients has a proprietary proofing system centered on Adobe PDF for routing documents for review and applying and compiling comments. Outputting InDesign layouts to Adobe PDF is an everyday occurrence for this client.

For new projects, LPK creates content-rich presentations in InDesign with Apple Keynote and outputs the files to Adobe PDF for easy delivery to clients and potential clients. In addition, LPK uses Adobe PDF files for job tracking. From the initial creative brief to specific design directions and next steps, LPK keeps a log of each job in Adobe PDF. These logs can be 200 to 300 pages long and often contain voice mail messages, notes from Lotus Notes, faxes, and QuickTime movies. Employees in client services, design, production, and other departments use the records in Adobe PDF to set client expectations and reduce billing questions.

"The time required to output InDesign CS layouts to Adobe PDF has been cut in half," says Remley. "Conservatively, each designer saves 30 minutes each day. Because designers' time is expensive, this saves us tens or potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars annually."

Only a select few could master the firm's previous page layout software. As a result, designers relied on layout and illustration experts, who were often booked in advance, for processes such as overlaying type treatments onto Illustrator artwork. The ease of use of InDesign CS has enabled designers to assemble pages and add type treatments on their own.

Sharing work with the worldwide LPK staff is also easier due to agency-wide standardization on the Adobe Creative Suite. A point-to-point virtual private network (VPN) connection and an Adobe software standard set among offices allows instantaneous, consistent file sharing. Further streamlining identity and branding across multiple offices, support for Unicode fonts enables LPK to produce materials in many Eastern European languages and in Arabic.

Lessening IT's burden

From an IT perspective, deploying and maintaining the Adobe Creative Suite has simplified software rollouts and ongoing management. Simultaneous application upgrades streamline implementation and training periods, reducing them from several times per year to one. Further lightening IT's burden, Adobe has consistently provided excellent technical support, resulting in fewer frustrations and less time spent resolving technical issues.

"We've been an Adobe customer since the early 1980s, and what Adobe has taught us is that there are vendors, and then there are relationships with companies and people within them who really care," says Remley. "Adobe is clearly the latter. The Adobe Creative Suite and InDesign CS teams have gone the distance to help us deliver exceptional results for our clients."