Expert: Roy Wilhelm - 4/29/2011

Question
Each year I create marketing materials for 65 cities across the country (Fliers/Postcards/promotion coupons/Posters). My question is...as of now all of these are in separate InDesign files, what would the benefits of combining all the fliers into one file or all the postcards in one file be if any? Each piece looks very similar to each other except the dates/locations/sponsor info of course would change for each city.  I am trying to find a way to streamline this process, and I am sure that InDesign has other ways that I can use it.

Answer
Hi Elise,

One of the pros for moving everything to a sing doc would be that you'd only have one file to manage. A con would be that if the file becomes corrupt, you'd lose everything! (Unless you're good about backing up your files).

Aside from that, it really sounds like you might benefit from moving everything to a single document and setting up Master Pages. Doing so will allow you to manage common items on a single, or a few, master page/s.

If you keep things the way they are, a good practice is to set up style sheets for Characters and Paragraphs and share them between the different documents so that everything maintains the exact same typography. You can also do this with color palettes.

I hope this is helpful!

Roy