: Managing a large amount of very similar designed materials? I am responsible for creating and maintaining a medium-sized (50 or so) and growing library of product/portfolio/informational flyers.
I am responsible for creating and maintaining a medium-sized (50 or so) and growing library of product/portfolio/informational flyers. Many of these flyers must include boilerplate information, like patent and regulatory notices.
I realized today (many years too late!) that there must be a way for me to make this change once and have it apply across many files.
Currently I use Illustrator for these materials, even though the majority of the "design" is simple layout with 1 photo and a lot of text. I've been told many times that I should be using InDesign instead (but you can tell me again; maybe I'll take the good advice if I hear it enough).
So the question is: what's the best way for me to make a boilerplate change in one place that will ripple across all other documents? Bonus points if I can somehow group documents into different categories so that a given change will only hit the documents that I want it to (or something similar to this).
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The cold, hard, truth is with Illustrator, you really can't. Illustrator isn't really designed to be a publish<>subscribe system (which is what you're describing).
There are some things which you can do though.
Raster images if linked rather than embedded will ask if you want to update if the image changed outside of Illustrator. If you embed the image, it's part of the .ai file and won't change.
You can create an Illustrator file then place it (again linked, not embedded) into another illustrator file and the same warning will ask if you want to update if the original file has changed.
As for text, other than using variables, there's no solid way to get Illustrator to see and update external text.
That is pretty much it for Illustrator. None of this makes it easy if you already have hundreds of files. Each file would need to be reconstructed in a manner to allow the above options to work.
Why you really, really, really should use Indesign...
InDesign is built for publish <> subscribe. It is designed to only reference external image files. You can also set Indesign to reference external text files.
Therefore any change which occurs outside a document will present either an auto-update of the changed content or a dialog asking if you want to update the document based on the external content change.
In addition, since InDesign merely references image files, InDesign file sizes are generally much, much smaller in terms of KB. You can use the same image across hundreds of InDesign files and not balloon any of the layouts.
Realize there's nothing which will auto-update closed files sitting on your hard drive. Updates only ever occur when you open a file.
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