The need for preflight quality assurance arose at the same time as digital technology became widespread enough to land in the hands of well-meaning customers who suddenly felt qualified to be graphic designers.

In those early days, a printer would have to inspect each digital document, manually verifying the appropriateness of art file formats, the presence of all versions of all needed fonts defaulted or improperly kearned fonts, the proper color coding, and various other factors. If just one critical element were overlooked, it was back to the drawing board.

Have you ever had to reverse your workflow because of a jaggy piece of art, a missing line of type, a defaulted font that looked "fine" on the monitor, a piece of art that just seemed to have colors that went from vibrant to dull? Those are the perils of accepting client work in digital format and attempting to output the job without a preflight procedure. Many of your well-meaning clients, and indeed, even ad agency artists, often do sloppy work from a technical standpoint, ignoring such issues as linescreen, dpi, RGB vs. CMYK and a host of other issues that can prevent you from outputting their piece in the way they believe they've provided it.

Building the Better, Faster, Cheaper Workflow

As with most large—and, often, geographically dispersed—corporations and businesses, the creative team at Weight Watchers Group found that it needed an effective way to bridge the gap between content creation and production for its numerous publications.

Markzware spoke with Donna DeMarco—the integrated marketing and publications manager for Weight Watchers Group, who oversees a diverse mix print and electronic media—about some of the challenges she faces with disparate workflows that cross over platforms (PC to Mac) and content-creation applications, like those that make up the Microsoft Office suite and Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Q: Can you tell our readers about your position with Weight Watchers Group, and about your day-to-day responsibilities in your current role?

A: The WWGroup, Inc., located in Farmington Hills, MI, is a franchise of Weight Watchers International. My responsibilities include coordinating special events—both in house and at outside venues—creating and managing content, designing marketing, communications, and advertising collateral. I’m also responsible for implementation of marketing campaigns, and act as a Web editor.

Q: Tell us about some of the publications for which you’re responsible.

A: We publish THINLINE, a quarterly magazine with a circulation of 250,000. The readership comprises Weight Watchers members and the health-conscious public. We also publish FIT TO PRINT, a staff newsletter that is produced monthly and has a circulation of approximately 1,250. It provides corporate information — things like, promotions and specials, training updates, and advertising and marketing initiatives that our staff needs to be aware of to conduct our business and best serve our members.

We also publish MEETING GUIDES, a weekly staff publication, and host three Web sites, including a site founded by the CEO and President of Weight Watchers Group, Florine Mark (www.florineonline.com); a Weight Watchers staff intranet site, and the official site for the Weight Watchers Group franchise.

Q: Does your department work in a PC- or Mac-platform environment?

A: Except for me, the department is PC-based, and most of the office as a whole works in the PC environment. And then we have field staff—approximately 1,200—who work mostly with PCs, with the balance on Macs.

Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.

As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.

"We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design," Ryan Moore recalls "We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we're suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around."

It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they'd already been using.

The only "glitch" in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a "glitch," and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.