Each year, the Grande Prairie Chamber of Commerce publishes a Membership Magazine which lists member information in up to two different categories, along with the option to purchase advertising space. With information coming in at the end of October, revisions well into November and a print deadline the 2nd week of December for January distribution, organization, efficiency and communication were key to the success of the project.
After breaking the job down into phases,and establishing submission guidelines and deadlines, a general template for each section of the book was created, including a general information section, a category index, member index and the main directory.
Member information was provided in an Excel spreadsheet. After sorting by category, InDesign’s data merge feature was used with paragraph styles to simultaneously import and style the data. A third-party script was then used to join the multiple text frames created by the data merge into columns. Extra spaces, category and inconsistencies in format were quickly corrected through GREP styling. Master pages were designed with text variables to automatically populate page numbers and categories listed on the side of each page. Once the contact information was formatted, ads were placed. Changes were made constantly throughout the course of the project; fortunately the use of Dropbox and the integration between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign allowed for easy modification and instant proofing. The indexes and a table of contents were produced once the final edits were compete.
