Picture of the Week

Picture of the Week
Anamorphic snowman

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The magic behind modern newspapers



CCi is some crazy European database program used to layout newspapers and magazines around the world (at least those who can afford it).

In these screen shots you see the main windows that dictate my day. There are lists of the stories, photos, graphics, pages and pieces of everything that will be in the paper that day (and other days)

Most of it works on a drag and drop function that ends up on the page.

The second picture shows what a designer sees: a rough layout full of dummy text and "articles" which encompass generally every piece of an article. On the left of that page are briefs but right now it's just dummy text.

Everything we're used to at The Sagebrush with paragraph styles is done in Microsoft Word as a tag function and automatically goes into the text. In fact, designers have little control over those tags. Copy editors control all text styles but not location.

Their screens look totally different. They only see "articles" - one at a time in their location and shape on a otherwise blank page.

As you can see I'm about to click "design done" which lets the copy editors know the particular "article" is ready for the next step. Each object on the page continues in this fashion (as you can see everything is listed in the budget window too and in its particular status).

At the end of the night, I watch windows like the last picture and wait for everything to turn green so I can print out a proof and eventually "typeset" (there are no PDFs or EPSs involved) a page and send it to the printing press.

It's pretty streamlined but doesn't allow for a lot of deviation from normal articles. Features should be exceptionally frustrating.

2 comments:

Jessica said...

And to think, I'm still working on understanding InDesign. From what it looks like, this doesn't allow for much creativity and playing around with layouts, does it?

Virginia Faith said...

How very nerdy......:)