Marketing and advertising. (Computer Publishing Conference '90 : Gathering on the trail to digital communication) (product announcement)

Marketing and Advertising In the session on preparing marketing and advertising materials using desktop tools, three users presented their experiences. They all were pleased with what they had accomplished, but none of them said it was easy.

NBC system. Bruce Kaplan, of Mind over Macintosh, spoke as a Macintosh trainer, consultant and application design specialist. His firm helped to set up an operation at NBC to produce TV Guide ads, daily newspaper ads and general-purpose inhouse materials.

The existing means of production involved traditional equipment, pasteup artists and the rest of the standard functions. The goals for a complete new system were to design and compose materials on the computer screen, to maintain quality, to relieve an existing bottleneck at the typesetter, to save money by eliminating pasteup and to expand design capacity.

Typographically, the target was to provide quality composition with, as a minimum requirement, kerning and tracking, condensing and expanding type, rotating text and setting text along a curved path. In graphics, it was important to be able to retouch continuous-tone images, create composite images and drop out backgrounds.

The solution involved Macintosh IIx computers with SuperMac monitors, Truvel and Hewlett-Packard scanners, LaserWriters and Linotronic 300s with PostScript RIPS (first the II, then the III). Software included Aldus FreeHand and PageMaker 3.0 and Silicon Beach's Digital Darkroom.

Within six months, all ads were being produced with the system and four pasteup positions had been eliminated. Kaplan reported that there had been problems along the way. The speed of the Linotronic RIP II was insufficient for the task, but the RIP III worked better. FreeHand worked well, but image processing was a bottleneck until they switched to Adobe Photoshop, which was an improvement. Kaplan said the Truvel scanner was adequate for the image quality needed.

The key factors in making the effort successful, Kaplan said, were exhaustive research and planning plus the customized training that was implemented initially and for a month on site. Finally, he said, the experience taught him a new …