InDesigner: Hal Leonard

Whether you’re into the Beatles, Beach Boys, Miley Cyrus, or Stephen Sondheim, Hal Leonard publishes the music you love—the sheet music, at least! In fact, if you’ve ever bought sheet music, there’s a good chance you have something published by Hal Leonard, the largest music print publisher in the world. Hal Leonard was founded in 1947 (the name is a combination of two brothers’ nicknames: Harold “Hal” Edstrom and Everett “Leonard” Edstrom), and now sells a catalog of over 200,000 products, including songsheets, artist songbooks, instrument instruction books and magazines, and books about how to make it in the music industry. Astonishingly, an in-house team of only 16—about half designers and half production staff—design and construct thousands of products and promotions every year. After switching from QuarkXPress about 8 years ago, they became enthusiastic users of the Creative Suite. Today, they are Creative Cloud members, and InDesign forms the backbone of their publishing workflow.

When it comes to “typesetting” the music itself, they don’t use InDesign. (Setting musical notation is called “engraving.”) That job is handled with other software, such as Sibelius or Finale. Music engravers have their own set of design rules which take into account factors such as the “optimal page turn” (where a musician can turn the page while playing).

The notation is then saved as PDF or EPS files and imported into InDesign using tools such as the PlaceMultiPagePDF.jsx script. (You can find this script buried deep inside InDesign’s Scripts panel; double-click it to place each page of a PDF onto a different page of your InDesign document.) Additional images and text are then placed around it in InDesign. These documents may span anywhere from a few pages to a full book of

a few hundred pages.

Plus, there are often multiple versions of the same song. Disney’s recent hit Frozen required over 25 different arrangements for various instruments, orchestras, and voice! Each musical arrangement is like a translation into a different language… and of course the arrangements are often literally translated into other languages, too.

And printed sheet music is only one part of the Hal Leonard publishing story. For example, John Jacobson’s Music Express is a 16-page magazine published both in print and as an interactive PDF that reaches three million schoolchildren around the globe.

Richard Slater, Vice President of Creative Services, notes, “We purchase photography and illustration, but all design is done in-house. We meet with the editor, we’re provided with the music, and we design these page spreads in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. The challenge came when they said they’d really like to give teachers an opportunity to project this on digital whiteboards in class and play video and audio clips.” InDesign’s ability to incorporate rich media into interactive PDF is key to the success of the magazine. Even better, the print, multimedia, and teacher versions of the magazine are produced from a single InDesign document.

Slater’s team also produces a prolific amount of sales material to support the products, including many catalogs showcasing hundreds or thousands of products. First, Hal Leonard’s advertising group uses InDesign with Em Software’s InData plug-in to choose which products and images to use and pull together a rough layout of what each catalog should contain. Then the creative group goes to work, formatting and finessing the catalog into its final design. This saves a lot of effort moving layouts back and forth between the two teams. Although the majority of the company’s products are printed—they have their own half-million square foot (45,000 m2) print, warehousing, and distribution center—they have also made strong moves toward producing EPUB files and iPad apps. The demand for digital sheet music is slowly growing, though most musicians appear to still prefer print. But, as Dan Gerber, manager of Hal Leonard’s eBooks division, noted, “imagine having thousands of songs published at your fingertips!” In order to maintain the precise look of the music notation, pages are rasterized and saved as PNG images. (They tried saving the artwork as vector SVG files instead, but buggy EPUB readers led to inconsistent results.) When asked which InDesign features the team uses most often, they point to the ability to place one InDesign file into another. For example, six or seven designers work on the Music Express magazine, each creating an individual spread with a unique style. As production team leader Nicole Julius points out, by importing each of these InDesign spreads into a “master” InDesign document, “it’s so much easier to update things! And then when I package, each InDesign document packages individually, too.” This also makes repurposing magazine content easy, because each spread is independent. Julius continued, “Also, you can add Nested Styles, GREP Styles, Object Styles, and the super-helpful and powerful Find/Change to my list of favorite features.” Dan Gerber applauded the Conveyor tools (the Content Collector and Content Placer), explaining that he loves how you can place a text frame once—for example, a song credit—and then duplicate and link it throughout a document. Then, later if you need to edit it, you can change it in one place and all the linked frames update automatically. This interest in some of the newer InDesign features is not rare at Hal Leonard. While at least half of the team members have been on staff for over 20 years, they’re still excited to try new features. As Slater concluded, “We have to keep learning new tricks. It’s a proven fact that we’ve been able to produce a very large amount of product with a limited staff because we’re working smart and using the newest versions of all these products.”