PageProof Academy: How to accelerate catalog approvals with PageProof & InDesign

Hello everybody, it's Marcus from PageProof here for another PageProof Academy, this time on accelerating catalog approvals. So what I'm going to go through today is, you know, how you can use PageProof in conjunction with a few of the other tools that we support on accelerating some of the things that you might be doing when it comes to catalogs and catalog production. I'll put forward to you some ways and techniques and tips that you can use inside of PageProof And of course, because of my history with InDesign, I'm going to show you some things inside of InDesign as well that you can use for helping accelerate your catalog approvals. So let's get straight into it. I am going to go straight into PageProof. I'm going to assume some knowledge of PageProof already, and we're going to take a look at the setup of your PageProof proofs that you send out for catalogs. So let's just jump in and get started. Okay, so first thing, here we are inside of the PageProof proof setup screen. So I have taken my catalog that I've been doing and I've dropped it into PageProof. It's taken me to the proof setup screen. So there's a couple of things here on the proof setup screen which are interesting when it comes to catalog production. And you'll see, of course, I've got the name of the proof and the collection that I might be putting it inside to kind of keep everything organized, and tags. So you can tag it with product codes or job numbers or whatever you like. So you just separate those by, you know, separate them by a space. So you can add those in. And of course, if you are working with any of these project management tools, then these are native integrations that you can connect to tasks inside of those project management tools to keep track of your catalog production so others can see. But then we get into some of the things that are interesting from a catalog point of view. So first one here is our due date. So this due date that you see here, this is the overall due date for the entire proofing process. So take into account all the different versions you might be having. This is the overall Hey, even if we go through 3 revisions or 4 revisions, this is when I need all the proofing done by. So that's what the due date would be to be done here. Also see that we've got automated reminders. I would switch on automated reminders when it comes to this sort of work, typically because you may have a wide variety of different people needing to, to come in and look at your work, but bearing in mind that their job, their full-time job is probably something else. So, a reminder occasionally from PageProof will serve them well. So, I do recommend turning on the reminders. You can set these defaults in your profile. So, you just go to the icon in the top right corner and then just set those up in your profile. Very useful. Now, if you are a PageProof Enterprise customer, you will also have this additional feature here, which is being able to set the proof high priority. And if you do that, it's going to move it to the top of the dashboard of all of your reviewers as well. So, this is a great way of saying, hey, actually you need to do this one first. So, you'll see this high priority flag showing up if you are a PageProof Enterprise customer. Now, the options that you'll see here, the download and the share link, of course you can, you can look those up and they're just standard parts of of PageProof, but there is another feature here. And again, this is an enterprise feature and it's called the Invisible Reviewer Comments. Now this one's turned on in my account so I can explain exactly why you would need this. And this has been set up specifically for when you are working in a catalog scenario and you have got competing owners of products on the same page or in the same catalog. And you don't want them to see each other's comments. So if you switch on invisible reviewer comments, what this means is that now you can invite, for example, Samsung and Apple onto the same catalog. They can see the catalog, but they cannot see each other's comments. And it means that they comment without having any visibility over what their competitor is commenting. So the invisible reviewer comments just hides the comments between competitors or between people who don't belong to your team. So these are your reviewers. Now, for you as the proof owner or the team— as a member of the team, you can see all of the comments that they put on the proof. So you're not restricted to see what they're doing. They are just restricted on seeing what each other are doing. So the invisible reviewer comments is a fantastic feature for catalog production, particularly if you don't want to duplicate different proofs for different suppliers because you don't want them to see each other's feedback. Just switch that switch on and it's all easy to go ahead with. Okay, so that is the reviewer comments. And I think that is a good feature. That's an enterprise feature. And it's something that is certainly worth its, worth its, worth the wait in gold when it comes to this sort of work. Right, now reviewers. Of course, we know about workflow templates. You can come in, choose a workflow template that suits your, the flow of your work through your organization for your catalog approvals. So you might have a creative team who are going to check the creative, so they can go first. Just have a step here for them. And then you might have an, an entire product team that are going to go through and they're going to check all the products. So you can have that. Then we've got a legal step here for the legal team to come in and they can, uh, check all the T's and C's and make sure everything is correct. So this is a standard page proof staged workflow, which you can use to separate out who is going to review it, and you can do it in the order that we see here. So it's going to start off on creative check, then go to Product, and then go to Legal. One little thing that's worth noting is that you can set a due date for this particular step. So Creative Check might get 1 day, Product might get 2 days, and Legal might get 1 day. So you can actually, uh, not connected to or not restricted by the due date over on the left-hand side, But you can also set almost like mini due dates for each stage of the workflow so that those people involved in those steps get the due date that you want them to see. Okay, so moving on down further, one other additional thing which is useful is adding a checklist. Now, as I mentioned, catalog production is one of those scenarios where somebody who's checking the catalog typically has a full-time job doing something else. They're either a buyer or they are, you know, they could be a supplier, they could be something else. They've got a full-time job doing something else. So when they suddenly get this proof arrive inside their inbox, they sometimes will not know exactly what it is they need to check. So you can add a checklist, and I've got a bunch of different checklist templates here, and I've got one just for standard approvals. That just guides them through, hey, I want you to check the images, I want you to check the branding, the spelling, the layout, and the fine print as well. So you can customize these checklist templates to be exactly what you need, and they can be anything. And you can include things like check the pricing, etc., etc. And it prompts people when they first arrive on that catalog, it gives them a guide on what it is they need to do, and they can check them off as they go through. So the checklist templates are super useful. Okay, so when you send this proof out, it's going to upload it into the platform. It's going to notify everybody, and they are going to be able to go through and put feedback on the proof. So I'm just going to jump over now, and we'll take a look at the proofing experience. So we'll just jump into the proof here. So here we have a— the proofing experience that people would see They receive an email notification, they click in, and here is the catalog that we just uploaded. And you'll notice the checklist has popped up right in front of us. We can go through and you can see it's a guide for what it is that we need to do. So, hey, you know, I'm going to check the images. So once I've done that as a reviewer, I can say, yes, I have checked the images and yes, I have done that. So this is why the checklist is super useful for reviewers. But if I look at this catalogue page here, I can see there's a lot going on. If I click onto the grid at the bottom, it's going to give me thumbnail view, and you can zoom up these thumbnails, by the way, so you can see more of what the pages contain, which is super useful. And then of course you can use the tools on the left-hand side of the screen to place feedback on the proof. Now you'll also notice here that as I navigate through this catalogue, I might be up to page 2, for example. You'll notice that there is a bookmark icon here. The bookmark icon is great for your reviewers because they can say, bookmark where I'm up to. They can go and do something else in PageProof, come back to this proof, and then they can say, okay, go back to that bookmark. Where was I up to? Take me back to that page. So the bookmarking feature is very useful for people as they're going through review. Whether it's a catalog or a video or anything else, bookmarking is a really, really great way of just keeping track of where you're up to in that progression of different pages and things that you need to look at. But what I thought I'd just show here is placing feedback on this proof. So I go back to page 1 here. Now, it's the same as you would do for any sort of proofing, but there are a couple of things which are super useful. So for example, if you look over here at this purse set over here, everything about that purse set is looking great. So you can use the pen tool, just the basic red pen. You can highlight over that and then inside of here you'll see there's a little icon here called Box Fill. If you click onto Box Fill, you can say that is approved and then add that on. And what it does is it puts a green tint over the top of that product box. And now that lets people know that you've approved it and we don't need to revisit it. So you can go through, particularly with catalogs, and you can go through and say things like, hey, this is also approved. I'm liking the look of this. So again, come in, just choose the approved box fill, and it's going to go through and put this green tint on top of the product boxes. So that's a great feature for those reviewers who want to go through and just say, yes, this is good, this is good, this is good. Other parts of the catalog, obviously, they want to be able to add changes to. So if we look up at the top corner here at this particular product box, you'll see it looks a bit empty. So what I'm going to do here is grab that pen tool and I'm going to say, look, in here, I think what we should do is we should add another bottle. And I'm going to attach the bottle that I'd like to be added into that position. As an attachment. So I'm going to say attach file, and then we're going to put that bottle there into there. So I'm going to suggest that this— here's the PSD that I'd like you to use and add that comment onto the proof as well. So now we have, hey, I'd love it if you went through and just added that bottle into that position. So this is a good way of just going through and annotating the catalog as you, as your reviewers. Now switching over to another page here, If I use the Zoom tool, so I can use the Marquee Zoom, by the way. So the Marquee Zoom lets us select over a particular area and that zooms up for us. I'm going to look here at this particular piece of copy. What I want to do here is just say, you know what, we want to put more information about this. So I'm just going to select over this piece of copy. It puts the copy into the comment for us, and I'm going to say, hey, I want it to put here Nail Products and just extend their headline. So you can select any copy you like on the catalogs and then just put in the text or whatever it is that you want to add on and just put that onto the proof as well. So now we've got a few comments going inside. We've got a few approved areas. We've got, you know, like to add this product into here. I could have also put a price change. So you can do all of these things inside of PageProof with your catalogs. So it's a great way of just quickly marking up all the, all the changes. Some extra features that I wanted to cover off, by the way, is over here with the Magic Tools. Now the Magic Tools have a bunch of different tools, and you know, there, there have been, uh, uh, PageProof Academies in the past about what to do with these Magic Tools, but there are a few new ones. So let me just quickly cover off what we have and could be useful. So this one here, the Ruler Tool. The Ruler Tool is great for just measuring elements on a page. So you can grab the ruler tool and you can say, well, how big is this box exactly? And it'll give you the dimensions of that. So you can just check to make sure that is what you are expecting for that particular product box. So that's kind of useful. Gridlines— if you turn on gridlines, it puts these rulers around the edge of the, of the catalog, and you can, as a reviewer, go in and just make sure things are lining up. So, you know, that seems to be right. I just want to check that. Yes, that does look okay. So it gives you these grid lines so you can make sure things are lining up the way you'd expect. So really useful for that. Now we get into some other features. So if you have QR codes or barcodes on your catalogs, then you can use the barcode scanner to, to highlight those and you can see what the contents of the barcode, barcode is. So you can check barcodes and check QR codes using that scanner. There is a spell check feature. Now this is new. The spell check will actually check over this document and it's going to highlight any areas where there are any spelling errors. It's going to go through and check this and then it's going to put up for us a few suggestions. So you can see here, uh, some of these may be brand names, by the way. So the great thing with this is that you can just say, okay, no problem, we can add this to our dictionary. That you've got. So you've got your own personal dictionary inside of PageProof as well, where you can add brand names and things so they don't occur in the spell check later on. Last couple of things, adding PDF, importing comments of PDFs. So this, this catalog page, you gave it to somebody who wants to work offline for some reason. They're going to their holiday home in, I don't know where, and they don't have any internet, they can take this PDF, they can use Acrobat to mark it up, and then when they come back online, they can use the feature here, which is import comments off a PDF. PageProof will read those comments off the PDF and put them in as PageProof markup. So that's super useful for that. And then finally, over here we've got a color check that enables you to go through and just check contrast up to readability standards so it's easy for people to access. Okay, so that gives a good indication of some of the things that you can do inside of PageProof. And again, over on that left-hand side, I think we've seen it before, but this is showing us all the fonts that are being used and the color profiles and all the colors and those sorts of things. So just remember that that feature is there as well. But what I'd like to do at this point is send these changes back and let's jump into InDesign and have a look at what you can do inside of there. So I'm just going to go through here and say I'd like that to be done. That's okay. We don't need to double approve it. So those are fine. And yes, I'd love this one to be done as well. So I'm just going through and marking up the changes as I'd like them to be done. And I'm going to send the changes back. So I'm going to say, changes please. And that's going to submit the decision on this proof. Now, if I switch over to Adobe InDesign, and here I can see This is the InDesign plugin that you can see right here. So here I am in the document that I'm, that we've been looking at inside PageProof. I'm now in the InDesign document that relates to that. Now, a couple of things I'd like to just bring up about how to best structure your documents and things, and I'll come to that in a moment. But what we'll do here is actually take a look at how you can use the PageProof InDesign panel to actually bring comments into your catalog from PageProof. So just highlighting on top of this name of the proof over on the right-hand side here, you can see we've got that option that says add another bottle, and then you can see this text change here. Now if I click onto the comment, it's actually going to jump me over and it's going to put the markup on top of my catalog. So I can see exactly right here. Okay, great. That's, that's where they wanted me to put this bottle. Oh, and they've attached the file. Great news. So if I click onto the attachment here, I can place it directly from inside of the PageProof panel, save it into my links folder. So I'm going to say yes, let's save that into links. And then you can see there is the bottle and I can just place that directly into the layout and then mark that off as done. So just say, yes, that's done. I'm happy with that. And we now move on to the next change. Now the next change is, if you remember, we had a piece of copy and if we zoom in a little bit here, we'll see that, um, that's the piece of copy on the product box right here. It's just showing us and it's highlighted it for us and we can see that the correct copy is in the comment. So what you can do here is very simply just say, okay, that's the copy that we want to target. This is the copy that I'd like in that spot on my InDesign document. You don't need to copy and paste it. There is a button at the bottom of the page proof panel here that will just— if I click it, it will take the text out of the comment and it'll put it directly into the InDesign file. So you watch the InDesign file, I'll press the button, 3, 2, 1, click, and boom, there's the change. Mark that off as done and then move on to the next of the changes. So if there are any more changes, I could go through and actually make those changes here, just working my way through all of the comments that are left by the team until I've got everything done. And then you can see here there's a button that says Upload New Version. Once I've completed all of the to-dos. I just click Upload New Version, and then that takes us to where we can now send out a new version of this proof directly from inside of InDesign. So no need to make any more PDFs or anything, just click Upload and away it goes. Now, a couple of things to note while we're sitting inside of the InDesign plugin with this screen up, which is the, you know, creating proofs If you're working in single pages, so if your catalogue pages are single pages and you want them to be spreads inside of PageProof, the best thing to do here is export as spreads. If you just choose that inside of here, it's the best way to do it because now PageProof plugin inside of InDesign is going to create a spread-like proof for you. And then when the comments come back, it's going to lay out the comments onto the right individual single pages. So if you've got a 3 and a 4 next to each other, and they will be a spread inside of PageProof, but they're going to be single pages in InDesign, but it'll still relate the comment back to the correct page if you've sent it out of here and you've checked on spreads inside of this, this area. So that's a great tip for those that are sending their work directly from InDesign out to page proof and then having the comments come back in. So a good thing there just to use the spreads. If you're using spreads or if you want to keep them as individual pages, you can do that as well inside of here. Okay, so some tips and tricks about, you know, how do you know or how do you manage catalogs when it comes to InDesign files? So this is just a few things that I've learned in the years of doing catalog production. If you got 16 pages, you got a 16-page catalog, you can do that in one InDesign file and that will be fine. So one InDesign file and you can just send that all out as 16 pages with the reviewers. They place their feedback and it comes back to you and you can manage that okay. The trick becomes, how do I handle 600 pages? So when you're working on a 600-page catalog, how do I do that? Well, the best thing that we would recommend for that would be to create a collection inside of PageProof for that catalog and then break up the pages into, into sections. So for example, if you're doing a catalog for, I don't know, a supermarket, you might have the fruit and veg section and you might have the white ware section and you might have the, you know, biscuits and crackers section. I'm not sure, but what I'm trying to say is Break up your catalog into these logical sections, and those are the proofs that you would send out. Now, the reason that you would do that, number one, you can obviously manage the catalog much easier for 600 pages versus, you know, I don't know, say 10 60-page sections, much, much easier to manage. But it also means that you can have sections coming back to you and they're not reliant on everybody proofing everything. And then you have to wait for all the people in your workflow to, in return, use a 600-page catalog with, with comments all over it. If you break it up into sections, you might have teams that are really quick at getting you back changes, so you can, you can work on those. And then another one, that's sort of a medium speed at getting you back changes, so you can then work on those next. And it just means that you are always working at getting it out, getting your sections done, and you're not sitting there waiting for a big flurry of changes coming back in. So that would be reason number 2 for breaking up the, the catalog. Now, if you put them all inside a collection, it means that you can still on the dashboard look at the collection overall and say, well, how are we going with the collection? Click onto it. And it'll show you all of the sections and it'll show you the statuses for each of the sections as well. So that's just a little tip on how you can manage those big projects using InDesign and PageProof to, to do that. Okay, so thought I'd come back into here and just quickly recap what we've just gone through. First thing there is in the proof setup, it's all about, hey, do I need invisible reviewer comments? A great feature. For just having even competing teams working on the same proof and not seeing each other's comments. So that's great. Thinking about your workflows and whether you need those sub-deadlines, super useful. And of course, that priority flag as well, if you need to do that. And then on the proofing screen, we spoke about the bookmarks and spell check and all those sorts of things, but it's also saying, how do we comment and actually leave comments that approve just a just the product box. So as you can see here over on the right-hand side, how do I just approve that product box and leave all the other product boxes alone? So you can do that using the feature inside of the box fill inside of PageProof. And then attachments for certain areas of your proof, you can do that. So really, really useful. Now what does that look like when it comes to comparison? Because that's something I guess which is really important is You know, here we have the finished proof that's been uploaded. You can see the bottle's being put in the position here, and we can see that copy change is being made. But this is where the compare feature comes in. How do you use the compare feature with catalogs? Well, if I click on the compare feature, it's going to open both of those proofs and put them side by side. Now, at this sort of, looking from here, it looks pretty similar. And this is notorious in catalogs. Catalogs have so much detail on them that it's sometimes hard to spot where the differences are. So it's very, very useful for you to just go in and hit on the Smart Compare button and then Smart Compare is going to overlay the two and you'll see it's going to flash where the differences are. So if you look now at the top left-hand corner, it's showing us, aha, here is where a change is being made. And the really great thing is that you can switch into this mode here, which is the slider and you can slide back on version 1 and then look at version 2. So you've got the ability here to just slide between the two versions and see what it was that has changed. So it's a pretty great way of checking things. Now if we go to page 2, you'll remember that we had a text change and again there you can see it. It's actually showing us, hey, this is the change that happened on this page. And if you imagine you've had pricing changes, product changes, spec changes, this is a very quick and efficient way of looking at changes on your proofs when it comes to catalogs. So if you imagine multiple changes on here, you could spot them in a, in a split second, and then you can make corrections if you wanted to. So that's how the compare mode would work for the catalog production. It really, really points out for you where those differences are. And of course, you've got that slider mode that I just spoke about where you can go in and see the differences between them, which is also super useful. And if we go over to that second page and we use the slider mode there, then you'll see there we have the copy up the top in that product box. You can see it's showing us the differences there. So that is how you'd use Compare for your proofing as well. So there we have it. There's some great tips there for your catalog production using PageProof. And of course, we're just bringing InDesign into the mix and using the Page Proof panel that is native to InDesign to actually bring changes in. So you can see those changes, make those changes, upload new versions, compare mode, and this will speed up your catalog production by a wide margin. So, and we look forward to bringing you another Page Proof Academy very, very soon. So look out for it. Thank you very much everybody for your time and have a great rest of your day.