InDesigner: Weldon Owen Publishing

What do Williams-Sonoma, the American Medical Association, and 3M Post-it® Notes have in common? They’ve all published branded books created, developed, and produced by Weldon Owen Publishing, one of the world’s leaders in the area of co-branded book publishing.

For over 20 years, Weldon Owen’s San Francisco-based headquarters, along with their offices in Sydney and Auckland, have produced highly informative reference, lifestyle, and educational books that are also visually stunning. In March 2006, the company and its trade imprint, Fog City Press, were purchased by the media giant Bonnier AB, but very little has changed about the Weldon Owen formula for success.

The company mantra is “quality,” and while it is practiced at every level of the organization, maintaining that standard in design rests ultimately on the shoulders of Creative Director, Gaye Allen. InDesign was first used by the Educational Group in the New Zealand office over two years ago, but it was Gaye whose forward-thinking vision brought it into standard use company-wide. Weldon Owen’s quality products demanded the use of the best quality tools, and for Gaye, that meant InDesign. From that point, everyone from senior designers to editorial staff embraced the change.

Art Director Kyrie Forbes, the designer for Williams-Sonoma’s Food Made Fast series, finds much about InDesign that she prefers over QuarkXPress. “Layers are a big thing because it means that files can be organized really well. It also means that in the sketch stages of design you can do things very quickly, by just duplicating a layer and making a new version. That means you can very quickly try new things, new ideas, and go back and forth between the layers so you can see quite immediately what you like best. It’s all right there, it’s done. Also, the interface and the way the program operates is so clean and well-organized, I feel like it helps make my files that way, too.”

“Another thing I definitely like is the way it handles type,” says Kyrie, “including the fact you can magnify your text onscreen. Typography is extremely important to our overall design, and for what we do with type layout, you need to get really close. Even the way it’s drawn onscreen when magnified is really clean.”

Much of Weldon Owen’s business involves licensing their titles for publication in other languages and countries. InDesign offers many advantages, including the ability to quickly generate PDFs for sending proofs via email, and using layers for language versioning. The company’s IT support staff like it, too. Scott Day, Senior Systems Administrator, says, “There are very few, if any, calls that have to do with InDesign itself, contrasted to calls all day long we used to get for QuarkXPress.” This benefit will be increasingly important as the company expands its products and editorial and design staff. Having a tool like InDesign that’s reliable and fun to use keeps everybody happy.

Weldon Owen’s Sydney office produces the Insiders series, designed to enable young readers to discover the inside story about some of their favorite subject areas. The first 12 titles include Egypt, The Human Body, Knights & Castles, and Dinosaurs, among others. InDesign’s layers features for separating text and illustrations play a key part, since the series is translated into multiple languages including French, Finnish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese.