InDesigner: Evansday Design

Rob Day is a graduate of the old school of design. In 1980, he established a fine art screen-printing company. “I avoided an early death from hydrocarbon poisoning when I learned Illustrator88 in 1988. It was my then-girlfriend, now-wife’s computer, and I learned design and typography from her.” In 1991 Rob beta-tested Photoshop 1.0, and in 1992, he wrote Designer Photoshop, one of the earliest third-party how-to books on the art of pixel-painting. “Then I realized I liked design a lot more than writing about software.” These days, Rob can be found at Evansday Design, a design and print production firm he, his wife, and his design partner (Gin Evans) founded in 1991. “Most of our early clients were book publishers, but their profit margins are so thin that you have to enjoy poverty to make a career of designing dust jackets. One company we continue to work for publishes books for young readers and needs high-end production and design. The production volume and budget offsets the lack of budget for design.” Evansday now does most of its work for private schools, designing admissions collateral. These clients expect high-end work and are willing to pay for quality. “Much of the work is printed in Asia on uncoated paper. The tactile quality of a well-printed uncoated sheet can’t be beat, but printing high-end work on uncoated sheets is very tricky and even tougher when you are not going on press. Adobe’s color management makes the whole process viable,” says Rob.

Evansday’s first big project built with InDesign was the Pingree School admissions catalog. “The year before, we produced an admissions book in QuarkXPress with complex digital photography. After that project we stopped using film-based photography.” InDesign met the increased color-management demands of digital photography. “The Pingree School

catalog also has a wrap-around die-cut cover that had to be very precise.” InDesign lets you position design elements as accurately and more easily than QuarkXpress does, and “instead of being stuck with a blocky 8-bit imported blur of my die-cut image, I could simply copy and paste from Illustrator into InDesign, and do my final tweaks there.”

InDesign’s object-oriented design appeals to Rob’s desire to tailor his tools. “Usually if there is something that irritates me about a program, I can script it away.” InDesign provides a sturdy platform for automation and customization; in Rob’s case, AppleScripting. “The criticism I’ve heard about InDesign is that it’s fussy, with lots going on all over the screen. But for scripting, all those on-screen elements are good. I use my most powerful script at the end of a project. It takes all the images in my InDesign document, opens each in Photoshop, then crops, skews, and rotates them to the specs I’ve used in InDesign, saves all the images at a uniform resolution, and replaces them in the InDesign document.” This kind of control means more predictability at final output.

When Rob took the InDesign plunge three years ago, he needed a reliable solution, especially after “desperately trying to get out from under the Mac OS 9 disaster. When it became obvious that OS X would fly and Quark didn’t care, we switched.”

And they haven’t looked back.

Pingree School: 32-page admissions catalog; perfect bound with die cut, wraparound cover; printed on 180 GSM uncoated paper.
Art Direction: Stuart Titus
Photography: Dan Courter

Legends of the West (Creative Education):
Series of eight 48-page books for young adult readers.
Art Direction: Rita Marshall

Genius (Creative Education): Series of five 48-page books for young adult readers.
Art Direction: Rita Marshall