'We kicked! We screamed! We dragged our feet!' - instituting desktop publishing in business

Communication World, Nov, 1989 by Marcia Hoeck

Desktop publishing helped us to meet our objectives and continues to be the best way to produce FOCUS on a timely basis.

We learned a lot about how we can make the best use of desktop during this particular conversion.

-- For us, desktop publishing functions more as a production medium than as a design tool.

-- It's better to underbuy when purchasing equipment. We used service bureaus until we really felt justified in adding to our equipment investment.

-- Pagemaker on the PC is not as easy as Pagemaker on the Mac, if you're not already using DOS, no matter what any retailer, manufacturer or trainer says. (But, as our client is PC based and uses E-mail, and as we could use a PC for our accounting and books, we have and use both.)

-- You don't actually skip typesetting and keyline, it just gets done in a different way.

-- Proofing copy in place on laser proofs is a real plus for clients.

-- It isn't always cheap, or even cheaper to work with desktop. Someone still has to do the work, but there are ways to keep costs down.

-- The biggest savings in desktop publishing comes in terms of time savings. We had to change a few habits, but found that by having control of the type in our studio for this kind of project, we can respond more quickly to changes and last minute additions.

A Mini-Seminar for Clients

Still, with all of the things that we were learning, we had found a puzzling communication gap with some of our clients, most of whom are writers in public relations and corporate communications capacities and are responsible for publications as well as one-time projects. Neither we nor they seemed to really understand how to communicate what we needed from each other to make the best use of our desktop publishing capabilities.

These clients all have computers and have been told by the manufacturers that they don't need their designers and typesetters anymore. They've been told that desktop publishing is cheaper, faster and better. And they're asking themselves some questions: Should they do desktop publishing internally? What types of projects could they really handle, and which ones do they need a designer for? If they don't do desktop publishing internally, should they insist that their designers use it for certain projects? Which ones? And when they put copy on a disk, why doesn't it come back from their designer as expected? And if they set their own copy for smaller internal projects and skip the designer altogether, why doesn't the typesetter fix their mistakes on the Linotronic runouts?

It was during a discussion with our typesetter, who had been experiencing similar confusion with customers, that we came upon a possible solution. It was obvious that, with desktop, the traditional roles of writer/client, designer and typesetter were being transposed, overlapped, omitted and just plain jumbled. So we said: "Let's just sit down, all of us, and discuss it."

Which is what we did. Together with our typesetter, Toledo-based Metzger's Type House, we planned a "mini-seminar." We invited writer/clients who we thought may have been getting pressure internally to design and typeset on their own computers. We also invited clients who, while not interested in desktop publishing internally, may have had unrealistic or unclear expectations of what was really possibly with desktop.