| The "America 24/7" production team knew from the get-go that it was going to need help — not just to figure out the best ways to automate processes but also to master InDesign. Enter Premedia Systems, Inc., a publishing technology integration and consulting firm whose principals, Peter Truskier and Jim Birkenseer, helped train the staff and analyzed and refined the workflow. Creating an efficient workflow was important not only to meet this book's deadline but also because it was the test bed for the production of 52 more books — one for each state plus New York City and Washington, D.C. — that are to follow in the next year. "Our assessment was that they faced a number of challenges, the foremost being the tight deadline for producing the book," Truskier said. "In addition, the multi-image strips that appear on most pages represented a major job in themselves, at least if they were to be done manually in Photoshop." The production team quickly became proficient in InDesign, Truskier said. "They took to InDesign quite quickly and became productive almost immediately," he said. |
| One of the reasons they were able to do so is that InDesign is so tightly integrated with the other Adobe applications in which they were already expert. "The interface and 'physics' of InDesign are similar to Photoshop, which makes flipping between the programs much more seamless," said Tom Walker, creative director. "It's all about integration. I love the fact that I can flip between Photoshop and InDesign without having to put on a different hat." The production team also found the capability to drag and drop native Photoshop files into InDesign layouts, and being able to jump back to Photoshop to edit the original, to be tremendous time-savers. "I love those features," Walker said. "When you're dealing with 300 or so images, every timesaving aspect is exponentially useful."
The other key feature was InDesign's robust support for scripting. Truskier and Birkenseer wrote ten scripts to automate everything from sizing and positioning display images, to populating the multi-image strips along many of the pages, to importing captions and credits from a FileMaker database. "InDesign boasts an incredibly rich and well-documented scripting interface," Truskier said. "We implemented virtually everything we wanted or needed using AppleScript and REALbasic. Photoshop is, of course, the standard image-processing application, and its easy integration with InDesign, along with enhanced scripting support in recent versions, allowed us to use it seamlessly in the automation." Photoshop was used largely to interpolate images, which were submitted at all sizes and resolutions but which all had to uniformly be 350ppi for the book. "Photoshop 7.0 has some nice fractal technology that interpolates files up, and does it gracefully," Zucroff said.
"There are many photographs in the book that shouldn't have been two-page spreads and which our printer said wouldn't work, but they look terrific thanks to Photoshop," Smolan said. And of course, some images required touch-up, much of which was performed by Digital Pond in San Francisco and by the book's Tokyo-based printer, Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. Take, for example, the photo by Joe McNally on pages 118 and 119, which was captured at the top of the Empire State Building. "It had a weird zigzag pattern," Zucroff said, "but the shots before and after it did not. It must have been a radio frequency emitted from the tower just as the photo was taken."
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) was also used to produce the book. Smolan would provide feedback using Adobe Acrobat®, and use the Adobe PDF files as a sales tool when meeting with publications and booksellers. But InDesign was the linchpin to an efficient design and production process for "America 24/7." "This was a real learning experience," Smolan said. "I had never used InDesign before, nor had anyone on my staff — not because we had any doubts that it wasn't good, but because people are always on deadline and never want to try anything new. This project should be a huge message to the photo, printing, and publishing industries about how far ahead of the curve Adobe's products are."
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