Stakeholders: This was a self-initiated project that I started because I felt a pain point for not only me and my team, but other stakeholders: Product Marketers and Content Editors
Problem: When I started at TIBCO, the templates were rigid and took too long and too many iterations to fit on single pages and were not set up with consistent paragraph styles, were not designed efficiently and did not look like they came from the same company.
Solution: I worked with stakeholders to establish what content types were needed and since we were limiting which collateral was printed, I approached this print design with a web design mindset. Consuming digitally allowed me to go onto additional pages.
I worked with content creators and editors to determine the paragraph styles and modules needed.
Where possible, I used Global Regular Expression Print and nested styles so that even less keystrokes and selections were needed to assign styles. I abolished the rigid design modules and allowed the form to follow the length of the content, giving basic word counts that were suggestions rather than decrees.
I placed all three content types into one template, differentiating when needed using parent pages, so that if a paragraph style was added or updated, it would be done once, and not thrice.
Now the templates were not only more visually consistent, but they were faster to typeset, layout, and review
Requests for “custom” projects were routed to this template unless there was a specific business need justifying deviating from it. However, we were still losing a lot of time and image downloads for the title page stock photos, so I optimized further, replacing the title page photo with a typographic-focused treatment.
Now the templates were not only more visually consistent, but they were faster to typeset, layout, and review.
I presented to our team and trained them on how to use the new templates, giving an overview of best practices and shortcuts. My thorough setup enabled two more rounds of easy style updates over the years and I eventually handed the reins to my direct report Amanda Cash to add new styles as our needs grew and maintain the layouts.