: What workflow should I use for enterprise-level business card creation? At my current company, we-- the in-house design team-- oversee the creation and ordering of each employee's business card.
At my current company, we-- the in-house design team-- oversee the creation and ordering of each employee's business card. This involves:
Duplicating a page in the master Indesign Document that houses all of the business cards
Placing the employee's information into the relevant fields on the new page
Exporting a JPG of that page for proofing (must rename file to correct format first)
Emailing that proof to the employee
Make any revisions if needed
If not needed, export a PDF of that page (must rename file to correct format first)
Send PDF to the printer
This process is tedious, and when multiplied out over the 4 - 10 card requests we may get at one time, time consuming as well. I know the real solution is to outsource this process to a printer-managed service that will allow the employees to setup, proof, and order their cards themselves, but the challenge we've run into there is that those services don't allow you to use custom typography, nor do they have a means by which proofs may be sent to us, the design team, for approval before the employee is allowed to place the order.
I've looked into automating the process in some fashion, but InDesign's limitations (namely its lack of an "export current page" feature and an ability to name files based on a certain fields) have made this prospect unlikely. So, those of you in or who have been in a similar situation, what would you recommend as a more efficient workflow for cranking these cards out?
Edit: to clarify, this document was initially created with data merge, but for new cards it's more practical to enter them manually. Each card in the indd document is based on a master page with paragraph/character styles.
More posts by @Welton168
3 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
I once worked at a quick printer. I changed, set up, and sent for proofing an average of 80-150 cards a day. Yes a day. These were all for different companies - 5 cards for A, 10 for B, 3 for C, etc. (back before Indesign, with QuarkXpress 4, Illustrator 8 [or maybe it was 6 or 7], and Photoshop 4/5)
There's no real shortcut. Your processes is a good one overall. It is just time consuming. But anything else will be just as time consuming.
If you outsource this to a print provider, guess what they would do? Yup. You're same process. They don't have any more business card kung fu than you do. (and they'll care less about errors to be honest).
Data merging and automator and all that sounds great. And it is, if you've got 50-100 card to do now. But if the requests come in at 4 or 5 a day, then automation and data merging won't really be that beneficial.
The one way I think you could speed the process is sending PDF proofs rather than jpg proofs. It should be no big deal for an employee to view a PDF instead of a jpg (phones and tablets support that as well). For a business card I'd just export one PDF/X-1a file and let the employee proof that. This would eliminate one stage of exporting and the PDFx file shouldn't be that large (kb) for a business card (but yes, larger than a jpg). If there are no changes, you just need to forward the PDF to the printer.
First off, you should be using the Data Merge even for the additional. There's no way it's, "more practical to enter them manually."
Now save yourself some time and send people PDF proofs, and do it through Right Clicking on the Page in the Page Template and doing "Print Page." Don't worry about renaming. Do all 4 or 5 or whatever.
For renaming:
OSX 10.9 Mavericks use Automator. Instructions on Apple.StackExchange.
OSX Yosemite can do it right in Finder
Windows can be done in Powershell
Alternatively as it's only a few files it might be faster to do it in Finder just using Copy and Paste on the file name and adjusting them. Still faster than doing it in the application prompt.
Depending on what the business card looks like, specifically if there are raster graphics on it, then you'll still need to do a proper page export once approved. If it's just text and vectors though your PDF from the Print Dialog is already set for printing. (Note: This is for business cards so assuming its just a digital printer, if someone else reads this thinking its okay for a book/magazine it's not. This hasn't gone through any sort of compliance / distiller)
Create a real template.
Standardize the text format for the information
Use Nested styles for the template --- you can use these to apply character styles
Import the character styles onto the page using Text Variables running heads feature
Save the .indd file using a naming convention which includes the person's name
One can then export a suitably named .pdf or JPEG trivially.
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.