Struggling with the Layout Process

[VuChu]

Hey everyone, 

I work with a government organization, and we do in house publishing. I'm responsible for laying out reports that include figures and tables. Sometimes, these reports are quite extensive, and sometimes I have to layout several of them at once. Quite honestly, I struggle with this because there are so many things that need to checked before they go back to the analyst for review. As much as I check them over, I still seem to miss things. 

I guess this is more of a mental process/strategy question than a technical question. But does anyone have approaches or even ways to build in some of these checklist items into the templates so that I don't miss things? Just looking for some ideas to apply to my process. 

Thanks in advance! 

[Creamer Training · Accepted solution]

You could put the checklist in the slug area on the parent pages. You could make the form with fillable fields-then include the slug area in your PDFs or print outs. In the image below, I also added the modified variable. 

I would need more info to give any better ideas.

[VuChu]

That is actually brilliant! Thanks so much, I'm going to do this. 

It's mainly a checklist for myself to make sure I don't miss things like figure references, placing textboxes/tables/figures in the right place, or even making sure I have included all assocaited figures with the report. 

Your suggestion is actually super helpful. Basically building the checklist into the template itself. 

Thank you so much. I wish I could have thought of this!

[Joel Cherney]

I have done a lot of similar work, but I don't know enough about how you're working to suggest anything concrete. If you are laying out your figures and tables with inputs from databases or Excel spreadsheets or other similar data sources, there's a lot of manual clicking around that can easily be automated away. 

[VuChu]

Hey Joel, 

I don't flow anything in from databases or from excel. It's usually just text from word, or I copy/paste tables from another indesign document, and graphics from illustrator. I typically will get the content first and flow it into a premade template that I created. The struggle is being to able to make sure I don't miss anything during the process and when the report is extensive or if it has a lot of figures, or if I am laying out several consecutively, depending on the stress level (deadlines etc.), I struggle to be precise with this. A checklist is seemingly the only option I could think of that would help.