Farago Design / Barnes & Noble

Farago Design / Barnes & Noble

The challenge

Previous versions of the Barnes & Noble Holiday catalog have been created using QuarkXpress with versions tracked via spreadsheets centralized in a SharePoint site. Manually updating and tracking changes during catalog creation required hundreds of man-hours.

We knew there were more efficient solutions out there, but frankly, they required substantial up-front investments and the payback was just not there.

Client:

  • Farago Design / Barnes & Noble

Document:

  • Multi-versioned catalog

Size:

  • 124 pages

Software:

Modules:

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You don't have to be a large institution with a massive IT staff to take advantage of NCDP (Network-Centralized Database Publishing) any more. There is a simple solution to what used to be the daunting task of creating and linking publishing software to complex network databases. Happily all the drudgery is managed via EasyCatalog and controlled effortlessly directly from within Adobe's InDesign CS2.
Peter Farago, Farago + Partners

The solution

Barnes & Noble used the NCDP solution to create their annual Holiday Catalog. The results were astounding. Data was entered into the system by merchants/buyers and marketing professionals at Barnes & Noble through a simple web interface (PHPRunner). It then flowed into a MySQL database. From there the EasyCatalog plug-in drew it into InDesign via a simple ODBC connection.

Key benefits

Real-time changes to documents are the key benefit. Because content creators and the content designers are linked via ODBC connections, changes to data ripple instantly through the system updating pages on-the-fly - completely eliminating the need for version control. Changes are tracked effortlessly by the software.

Working with 65bit

We are a small shop with limited IT resources so when we were shown the 65bit/InDesign solution it made perfect sense to us. It was clearly a solution we could manage ourselves. Your software was highly instrumental in the sales process. It convinced our customer to abandon traditional resources and select us as the sole provider on this job.

B&N Production Process

PDF overview of the Barnes & Noble production process

All of this happens in real-time. I feel much more secure, knowing my client's data is finding its way directly to the page layout software without being over-handled and possibly corrupted along the way.
Penny Urion, Farago + Partners
Process Map

Farago’s proposal to Barnes & Noble, illustrating the anticipated time savings using EasyCatalog