In the rapidly shifting world of high technology, effective marketing communications need to be heard above the noise and to distinguish your offerings from numerous noisy competitors. At least, that’s the premise on which Banner Corporation pitches its wide portfolio of services to its clients. And with names like Cisco, BT, Netscape, Nokia, GE and Novell on board, it seems that Banner is getting its own message through as well.

The London-based company, which was established in 1984, offers a suite of complementary communications services from PR to direct marketing, brand research and advertising (creative and media buying) to events management. Its approach encompasses both traditional and new media, so there’s still plenty of design for print going on.
Adobe stalwarts Photoshop and Illustrator have been part of the Banner design studio for many years, so when the company introduced InDesign in 1999 it was a natural move to look at what it had to offer. But it wasn’t just the page layout functionality that was of interest, as studio manager Simon Evered explains:

"PDF was already a big part of our workflow, and it’s getting bigger. We use it for client approval via e-mail and were looking to integrate the design sign-off and prepress stages; more and more printers are building in support for PDF and asking for it as a delivery format. We were interested in InDesign anyway, but the PDF export capability was a good reason to look more closely."

Evered’s background in graphic design, artwork production and repro meant that he was all too familiar with the problems that can arise when native application files are handed off for production. "There’s so much that can go wrong," he says, citing examples from the obvious missing fonts and graphics to trickier ones like graphics which use type as a repeating background image.

The advantages of working with PDF both for client approval and prepress hand-off were clear to Evered but producing high quality PDFs from Quark XPress was not always straightforward. In addition to going through the two-stage process of printing PostScript to disk then processing it through Acrobat Distiller, the studio found that instead of getting cleanly scaling vector graphics in their PDFs, low resolution screen previews were being embedded instead, leading to concerns from clients about how their logos would reproduce.

As well as the straightforward and reliable PDF export facility that InDesign offers, Evered appreciates the program’s built-in pre-flighting capability. "As well as checking for graphics in RGB instead of CMYK, it can collect both graphics and fonts for output and re-link graphics to their new locations so that everything’s in the right place when the file is received."

Page layout finesse
Although InDesign’s PDF support capability was one of its major attractions for Banner, Evered has found plenty to recommend it in pure page layout terms. "There are lots of little features that make life easier," he says. "I particularly enjoy the typographic control – for people who remember typesetting, it’s nice to see that someone’s been thinking about this. With features like the multi-line composer we can get better copyfitting and avoid widows."

Evered likes the master pages items whose attributes can be selectively locked – to prevent accidental movement or deletion, for example, while allowing colour to be changed or conversely, retaining manual edits like colour changes, while remaining linked to the master page and reflecting changes in, say, font or font size, when the master item is updated.

The time spent setting up master pages, paragraph and character styles is well spent, leading to smoother workflow, according to Evered, while dialogue boxes that reflect the effects of the designer’s changes while still open are another boost to productivity.

Integration with other regularly used Adobe applications is all Evered would expect it to be: "It goes without saying, Illustrator and Photoshop work together seamlessly and the way they move together with InDesign is very nice. It’s all familiar, 30 per cent of the interface is identical."

Import of native format Illustrator and Photoshop files is particularly convenient, but for some jobs, Evered now finds that he doesn’t have to go outside InDesign at all - "With text on a path and vertical justification, there’s more that you can do in InDesign," he comments.

Support for layers comes into its own with multi-language publications, something that Banner often has to deal with as part of pan-European projects for its clients. "Working on separate language files it’s too easy to move a picture accidentally and change the text wrap, so we’ll put the translations onto separate layers," Evered says, "that way we know that every image is always in position in each language."

Nested frames are another powerful capability that has already been put to good use. By enabling images to be placed inside text frames, complex effects involving black type against knocked-back graphics and reverse-out type from full-strength sections of the same graphics were efficiently and consistently achieved in xtreme.web, a Web promotion tabloid newspaper format publication for Adobe.

Adobe’s decision to make the architecture of InDesign as open as possible to encourage the development of plug-ins makes sense to Evered; he cites the situation that can arise with Quark XPress in which different Xtensions can conflict with one another.

Of the new features added in InDesign 1.5, he particularly likes the eyedropper tool which can be used to quickly sample and copy formatting attributes such as typeface, size and other paragraph style settings from one piece of text to another. Working on specialist hi-tech publications, Evered and the design team at Banner also find InDesign’s built-in spelling capabilities a boon; unusual or infrequently used words be added to the user dictionaries on a document-wide or global basis.

Banner can be contacted via its Web site at www.b1.com.