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Company
- Flat Inc.
- New York City, New York
- www.flat.com
Challenge
- Find an integrated design environment that promotes a more fluid creative process.
Solution
- Use Adobe® InDesign® software along with Adobe Illustrator® and Photoshop® software.
Benefits
- Flat can produce more innovative designs than ever before while saving time.
Toolkit
- Adobe Acrobat®
- Adobe Illustrator®
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe Photoshop®
- Apple Power Mac G4 computers
Playful, accessible design
Adobe InDesign software brings out the best in Flat designers
At the Flat studio in New York City, great design starts with simplicity and practicality. While this may sound dull, nothing could be further from the truth. Flat's work has a solid strategic foundation — an understanding of what makes clients tick — but it is also accessible, colorful, playful, and exceptionally thoughtful.
Flat's blend of strategy and creativity has clients such as the New York City (NYC) Marathon, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) coming back for more, and publications like How, GD USA, and I.D. Magazine extolling the firm's virtues. The six-person studio creates campaigns that cross multiple media outlets — from print, interactive, and broadcast to environmental-based media. Flat's clients are equally diverse, spanning educational, political, industrial, artistic, and entertainment organizations.
Consistency across media and tools
The 2002 and 2003 image campaigns for the NYC Marathon exemplify Flat's strategic and creative prowess. Flat created the concepts for both campaigns and applied them to the Web, outdoor advertisements (including buses, phone kiosks, trains, print ads, and posters), merchandise, and environmental graphics. Flat prefers working with clients like the NYC Marathon that recognize the need to converge marketing materials into one look and feel. "Communications should be consistent, visually and otherwise, across all media," says Petter Ringbom, partner at Flat.
Similarly, Flat believes in using consistent tools to keep the design process more fluid. Ringbom introduced Adobe InDesign to Flat after he began using it in 1999. He favors its integration and similarity with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop software. "Design is an organic process," says Ringbom. "Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop form a seamless environment that minimizes creative disruptions."
Flat designed both the 2002 and 2003 image campaigns for the ING New York City Marathon. InDesign let the firm combine native vector artwork and transparent backgrounds to create these sophisticated layouts.
More fluid design
For Ringbom, the simple ability to copy and paste vector graphics from Illustrator into InDesign and then continue to modify them is a major breakthrough. "I used to think of illustrations within layouts as 'black boxes' that couldn't be touched," he says. "Now, the interplay between text and illustration really flows. I can design type and change the color and shape of illustrations right within InDesign."
The integration across Adobe software proved especially valuable in creating a large-scale exhibit for the Van Alen Institute, "OPEN: New Designs for Public Space." Flat worked with architecture firm Freecell to create a visually distinct, information-packed traveling exhibit. The display system Flat developed includes a show identity, collectible project sheets, and a modular panel system to house the 350-plus graphics and video monitors.
"Design is an organic process. Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop form a seamless environment that minimizes creative disruptions."
partner at Flat
Many of the outdoor pieces for the 2003 NYC Marathon were printed with a six-color process to ensure the vibrancy of the red heart and the green field. According to Flat designers, the transparency flattener in InDesign stood up to the task.
"The entire exhibit was printed digitally, so we had to collect material from a wide variety of different sources. Sketches, drawings, and wall text were scanned into Illustrator and photos were scanned into Photoshop," says Ringbom. "It was easy to bring everything into InDesign, complete the layout, and even scale and crop the images right within InDesign."
For "OPEN: New Designs for Public Space," an exhibition at the Van Alen Institute in New York City, Flat used InDesign to create exhibition graphics, posters, take-aways, and a catalog. Color in InDesign output consistently across several print processes.
"For Flat and for the design industry as a whole, moving to InDesign really makes sense."
partner at Flat
More than simple assembly
InDesign also shines at publication work. Ringbom first used the software to recreate Nordic Reach, a quarterly magazine of Scandinavian culture that Flat continues to produce. While Ringbom views other page layout programs as simple assembly tools for basic typesetting, he uses InDesign for the most graphics-intensive tasks, such as the Nordic Reach cover. "I can bring layered Photoshop files into InDesign and edit them on the fly," he says. "With InDesign, I don't have to keep going back and forth ad infinitum between applications, editing files, resaving them, and placing them back into my layouts."
Ringbom uses style sheets in InDesign to speed production and manage each section of the magazine. High-resolution image preview in InDesign saves time by eliminating the need to print multiple versions of the layout to view work in progress. He uses the story feature to automatically hang punctuation, a procedure that's painful and time-consuming to accomplish in other programs. "With InDesign, it looks like I spent hour after hour tweaking type," says Ringbom. "The beauty is that I spend very little time, but the typography looks beautiful."
Flat uses InDesign to design and produce Nordic Reach, a quarterly magazine of Scandinavian culture. He uses style sheets in InDesign to speed production and manage each section of the magazine. The software's high-resolution image preview feature saves time by eliminating the need to print multiple versions of the layout to view work in progress.
