The client was in the process of developing a sub-brand to promote natural products in their stores. Due to the soft franchise principle, some stores carried the regular identity, some stores fully switched to the new sub-brand and some stores carried their own identity. To accomodate all parties, a series of three flyers was made, each carrying the same information, but with different designs. Our studio would make one flyer, then copy & paste the info into the other two designs. This was made possible by coordinating paragraph styles in all three template documents in InDesign. I will explain the process here.
This is the basic flyer layout, front and back. In the rest of this article I will use the front to explain the process. As you can tell, the flyer has a rigid, boxed layout.
By making sure all three flyers share the same basic layout I can simply copy images and text from the first document and paste everything into place in the other two documents without having to worry about placement of logos and other important information. As you notice, the three flyers have their own typography applied to the text. This is where the fun starts! It’s possible to copy and paste text from one InDesign document into another and automatically apply the typographic styles of the new document. This is done by using paragraph styles.
Paragraph styles.
Each piece of text is labeled with it’s own paragraph style. Paragraph styles are saved within an InDesign document. By applying a paragraph style to a piece of text you add an anchor to that piece of text which refers to a set of parameters such as text size, colour and font family. The anchor is carried over when you copy/paste that piece of text into another InDesign document. The anchor will look for the set of parameters with the same name in the new document. If there is one with the exact same name, the parameterset of the new document will be applied to the text. In this case for example, it means that LABEL_naam, will automatically make the text “Voor iedere huid de perfecte verzorging” dark grey in one document and yellow in another.
Thats it! While the result looks the same as any other flyer you get through the mailbox, clever and consistent usage of paragraph styles can considerably speed up the production process. Especially with recurring (and large volume) productions it can be worth your while to spend a little time setting up paragraph styles.
