Modern Drummer: cost efficiency and quality need not be mutually exclusive goals, as this art director discovered using a system built for the magazine's design

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 1988 by David Creamer

Modern Drummer Cost efficiency and quality need not be mutually exclusive goals, as this art director discovered using a system built for the magazine's design

In many cases, the art director at smaller magazine companies like Modern Drummer also serves as part-time production manager with a mandate to hold costs down. As art director, however, I find the overall quality of the magazine a heavy counterweight to balance against production cost savings. You can always save money by using lower grades of paper, cutting the amount of color used, or sacrificing the quality of four-color separations. But such changes will obviously affect overall quality. Therefore, for production managers such as myself, using microcomputers for type-setting and layout is one of the easiest and least painful ways to make production more cost efficient.

The desktop system we now have in place--which produces our flagship monthly Modern Drummer, our quarterly Modern Percussionist, an annual directory, and virtually everything else we print--is advanced enough that the quality difference from previous traditional production methods is negligible. What's more, with all the work we produce on computers, we're saving about $40,000 per year in basic production costs.

Getting started

It was in early 1985 that we began looking for a small computer system to do some of the numerous promotion jobs that are necessary for smaller magazines. We knew about the expensive dedicated publishing systems, but could only dream on our limited budget. However, we soon began hearing tales of limited publishing systems for small, less powerful personal computers. Curious, I attended a few local demonstrations. These systems were crude by today's standards. Rules were not "drawn in" on the screen, but coordinates were typed in to indicate where the rule began, where it ended, and how thick it was. My main interest was saving money in production--not becoming a computer programmer.

I remained unsatisfied until one day our publisher, Ron Spagnardi, put a magazine called Corporate Publishing on my desk. It told of a new computer called the Macintosh that was designed and operated with a visual and graphic orientation. Knowing that nothing could be as good as this magazine said it was, I went down to our local Apple store and got a demonstration of a program called PageMaker (the program was not out yet, but the store had a pre-release demo disk.) It looked good, but I was skeptical of its ability to do the kind of graphics we needed for our various promo pieces. Therefore, I gave the salesman a copy of our rate card and asked him to reproduce a portion of it. Three days later, he showed me an almost identical copy of our rate card. With proof that the system was capable of handling our needs, I went back to our publisher and convinced him to spend $4,000 on a computer even though the software that we wanted wouldn't be available for another three months.

We purchased one of the Macintosh 512s, and the computer store loaned me a copy of Ready, Set, Go! to work with while we waited for Page-Maker. Because we couldn't afford a laser printer, we bought a dot-matrix printer for proofing--and I was constantly running up to the computer store for laser prints, which we sent to the printer. Because the laser printer outputs at only 300 dots per inch (dpi), the promo pieces were designed to be printed on uncoated, textured stock to cover up the crudeness of the type.

The first week PageMaker came out, I used it to produce a six-page rate card that would have cost us at least $600 to produce traditionally; our cost was $12 for laser prints. For the next year and a half, I produced everything I could on the computer, paying for the initial investment many times over.

Eventually, software and hardware developments allowed us to consider our system for more advanced work. The early software suffered from a lack of hyphenation and kerning capabilities, while the hardware lacked speed and output resolution. In late 1985, Allied Linotype announced two high-resolution output devices, one at 1270 dpi and the other at 2540 dpi--equal in resolution to traditional typesetting devices.

More sophisticated

As a result, we considered the Macintosh for more sophisticated projects, such as a new equipment annual we were planning to publish that summer. I estimated that the 130-page magazine, with its catalog-like format and many tabular columns of data, would have cost us approximately $8,000 using traditional methods for the typesetting and mechanicals. I produced it on the Macintosh for $780. With this savings, we purchased a laser printer for proofing; the final pages are sent via modem to an outside service bureau.

In the meantime, we had started a quarterly magazine in addition to our regular monthly. I had hoped to produce it on the Macintosh, but the software was not yet up to the task. Finally, nearly two years after we first got the Macintosh, Letraset's Ready, Set,Go! 3.0 came out. It offered H&J, auto and manual kerning, and autopagination features. Because the quarterly had a much smaller budget, saving money was crucial. The editors and the publisher were shown samples of what the program could do, and they gave the green light to proceed. At this point we upgraded our equipment to a Macintosh Plus (1024K) and a 20mg hard disk. The results were far from perfect, but close enough. Nobody, except for people in the typographic/publishing field, could really tell that it wasn't produced on a traditional system. This was saving us approximately $1,600 per issue--or 80 percent on base production costs.