"But What Are They Playing?"

April 2, 2006 10:41 PM

I have a week to make a set of three concert programs for an upcoming music festival at my university (I am a music student). LaTeX? InDesign? Word? The catch: I am a novice (albeit an eager one) at all but the latter program.

They don't have to be anything fancy -- probably between 3-6 pieces at each (and the fewer pieces, the more individual movements, of course). I also will be making some sort of a "festival overview" sheet that will have short bios of clinicians, and information about the students attending. All of these will most likely be only a page long (they needn't be folded booklets or anything).

What is the best way to go about making these (particularly the programs... I am less worried about the overview sheet). I am just learning Tex and LaTeX, but I wouldn't feel comfortable using them unless I had a really excellent guide in front of me (something like "Using LaTeX to Create Concert Programs). I have Word on my mac, and access to the entire Adobe suite here at the school. While I'm pretty comfortable with Word, I have no experience with InDesign, which would seem to be the next best bet.

Anyone have any experience with this? As I said, they don't have to be fancy, but it's extremely important to me that they look great (this is why LaTeX is such an appealing option, and Word less so).

P.S. For those who who want to contribute but know little about concert programs, I'm trying to make something that at least comes close to resembling this, but even simpler would be fine: Concert Program (pdf)

posted by rossination to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Upon re-re-reading, I realize that this could be a bit vague. I'm not designing the layout of the musical selections themselves; rather, I will be given a list and told to make the printed program from there.

Sorry if this was confusing.
posted by rossination at 10:48 PM on April 2, 2006

Others may disagree with me, but looking at the sample program you provided, I'd say there's little reason not to go with Word. InDesign is fantastic, but its killer features are things like advanced typography algorithms (it can make paragraphs of text look really good), integration with Photoshop (images that are translucent in photoshop will look translucent in InDesign), advanced color control and other things that aren't really relevent to what you're doing.

LaTeX rocks too (in fact, that's where InDesign got its typography algorithms from), but its not worth the learning curve for something like this. Your project isn't large enough to really benefit from the LaTex way of doing things.

So if you know Word, you should be able to use it to achieve results comparable to your sample program. If you try, and just can't shake the feeling that it looks ugly somehow, try InDesign (its not difficult to use).
posted by gsteff at 10:58 PM on April 2, 2006

The fantastic thing about LaTeX is that it takes a lot of the design control away from you. You give it the text, and some hints about how to \emph{modify} certain bits of content, but it ultimately dictates how things look. Creating your own layouts is very, very involved.

Given your time constraints, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.

Word, sensibly applied, can quite easily accomplish a layout similar to the example posted, and with minimal learning curve.

As to InDesign, you have no need for its more advanced features, but you'll still be forced to work with, around, or alongside them. Its learning curve is therefore rather steep, especially for a simple layout that doesn't require any typographical magic.
posted by SemiSophos at 11:18 PM on April 2, 2006

Just in terms of bang for the buck, use what you are most familiar with. Word will do it, and it is probably less time to learn how to deal with text and graphics frames in Word than to learn something else. Actually the linked PDF was produced in Word, (suspected it from looking at the word "Scott" then confirmed it from looking at the file meta-data.)

InDesign will do it better, but there is no point in learning it for a one-off. If you think you will use InDesign for future projects, it might be worthwhile to start picking it up now. I'd use InDesign but I've been making heavy use of it for about 6 months now, especially as a replacement for PowerPoint.

LaTeX works great if you can find a mature documentclass that does almost exactly what you want. If you can't find something that does almost exactly what you want, developing layout can be an arcane and frustrating task.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:56 AM on April 3, 2006

Go with what you know.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:35 AM on April 3, 2006

I agree with other posters, do it in Word. You've got plenty of time to fiddle with it to get the best results. Of course it is possible that someone will post here with a fantastic LaTeX class for concert programs, and then you will have a real choice.
posted by teleskiving at 3:26 AM on April 3, 2006

Go with what you know, unless A) you have 4-8 hours to spare and B) want the benefits that come from learning proper desktop publishing software. If you master it now, you'll be producing killer party flyers for the rest of your days.

I have never used LaTex, I'm afraid, but just yesterday I picked up InDesign for the first time. I'm pretty good with Quark and I'd been forced to use Pagemaker for years, but I came to InDesign and it just felt right.

All the features are just where you think they should be. All the sub-menus and palettes are logically laid out. Forming a stylesheet (a set of formatting rules for paragraphs) is effortless if you know the terminology (plan on another 2 hours reading articles like this one and this one if you don't).

If you're going the InDesign route, I've written out what you'll have to do. It really isn't my intentiton to insult your intelligence with any of the following, so if some of my advice seems too basic it's probably just because it wasn't so basic to me when I discovered it!

First, get your text sorted. You'll have an easier time if you're working with a finalised text and orchestra lists of a known length.

Fire up InDesign. It ships with a great many example documents — full layouts with image placeholders and lorem ipsum text — and by messing around with these you'll start to learn a lot about the way page elements are handled in the program. Notice that text is always in a text box, and text boxes can be any size, anywhere. Shrink one so that the text doesn't fit anymore then click on the red '+' and click again to place that excess text in a new text box. Shrirnk the first one some more and see that they're linked. Notice also that the examples have margins and grids on which these elements are laid out.

Now read this, and grab some paper and a ruler. You're not going to need as complex a grid as Mark Boulton's at this stage, but hopefully you see the point of working out where your margins are and the major lines you want each page to have in common. Sketch a few variants and pick one.

Open up the Pages palette and layout the grid you've designed on the master page. At this stage, you'll probably be going back and forth to the help file to work out terminology and the way margins and guides are treated in the programme. If you do this now, it will be worth it later.

Gather any images you want to include. Remember your grid when you're deciding on the images and let it determine to some extent the size and orientation of your images. Get the largest ones you can find, put them into Photoshop and try to get them up to 300dpi at the correct size for the page. If you're hazy on that step, you've got more work to do with the helpfiles.

Now you're ready to get that text and those images into you're grid. This is where the real design comes in. Your instincts are a good guide. Think in terms of balance, flow, grouping, emphasis, and overrall harmony.

It will take a lot of time to get your documents looking the way you want them. The help files are excellent, but you want to be mainly working with the program and using them as references as and when. Once you're done you'll have a great new skill.

If you're willing to go through all that, then InDesign is for you.
posted by godawful at 4:05 AM on April 3, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh, and another wonderful InDesign featurer I discovered this morning: press w to instantly switch the "Screen Mode" between the normal design view and a preview mode that gives a good approximation of your output.

All those years I wasted with Quark...
posted by godawful at 4:09 AM on April 3, 2006

godawful is right about how easy InDesign is to pick up. It doesn't have nearly as steep a learning curve as PageMaker, and is lightyears ahead of Quark in terms of usability. If you're reasonably computer-saavy, you could probably learn the basics in a day.

There's also the budgetary aspect to consider: if you've already got Office, you don't have to spend $whatever on InDesign. Unless you have no scruples about downloading it somewhere.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:46 AM on April 3, 2006

I used to do just this as an editor at a classical music magazine. We used Quark to lay out the books, but what everyone else has said here is right -- you can do this using Word if you have to. And if you're short on time, that's probably the way to go. I'd make it a pdf before you take it to the printer, though.
posted by mothershock at 7:29 AM on April 3, 2006

As many others have pointed out -- go with Word for now, but if you'll be doing this in the future, InDesign is a great program to know. Once you have it down, you can whip things out really, really fast. I'm not a graphic designer (I'm a bit of a dunce when it comes to design), but InDesign lets me quickly produce things that are easy to read and not distractingly ugly. I'm talking half an hour, if the content is already prepared, for an 8 page booklet.
posted by Marit at 7:55 AM on April 3, 2006

it's extremely important to me that they look great

Then you shouldn't use Word. Using that hideous, bloated abomination for layout and typography is what grandmothers and middle-managers do. I guarantee you that using it will produce utter shit that will reflect poorly on the event. I'm not even going to mention what your poor printer will think upon getting a .doc file.

If you want it to look good, work with a talented design student and use InDesign. I'm certain that there are plenty of smart kids out there itching to beef up their portfolios and a university-sponsored project is gravy. Just make sure to stay on their ass because the bulk of them are lazy as hell.

Good luck.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:26 AM on April 3, 2006