Layout Champ and CCI

Is there a difference between layout and design?

 

Here is my half-serious, overly simplistic definition:

Layout is stories and photos on a page, with the space between stories consistent with the newspaper's style.

Design is "creative white space" thrown around in all kinds of places.

ESPN magazine is design on LSD.

 

In the spirit of being overly simplistic, the difference between column writing and gamers are gamers tell you what happened in the game, and columns have a bunch of "I think's" and "they should". :

 

Can't agree strongly enough. It's an excellent system for words and design, once you catch on. If you have any Microsoft Word background, it's easy to pick up. Being able to go back and forth between text and design is a HUGE benefit.

We had Quark designers who didn't like it, at first, but they were won over eventually when they learned the full use of the software. Look at Dallas and Fort Worth. They are both CCI Layout Champ, and their sections win lots of design awards.

 

That might be your problem. Layout Champ needs way more memory and chip speed than the minimum CCI says it does.

Disc drives? Really?

 

CCI is great for editing copy. Very simple to learn.

 

Layout Champ is like a Lamborghini or Rolls Royce if you only want to drive it around the same track everyday.

If you want to do something different (creative page design), you have to take the entire vehicle apart and put if back together to get it off the track.

For inside pages it's quick. But you need to have planned the order in which you'll place page and article elements. Get out of step, or change your mind, and you're screwed.

I think the Danes messed up and shipped Layout Runner-Up.

I'm sure that when the real Layout Champ comes out, it will be much better.

 

Agree.

I'm stunned at the effusively complimentary responses on this thread.

 

Oh, and I forgot to mention, compared to any other pagination program I've ever used, the photo sizing and cropping function in Layout Champ sucks stinky cheese.

 

What am I missing here?

You call the image up in the image pallette, draw a box around what part of the photo you want and voila, it's cropped.

If you have a 3-column piece of art in a four-column package, and a story comes in long, it takes one click to go 3 on 4, with the (now smaller) photo taking up roughly 2.5 columns and allowing the type to fit. Five minutes before deadline, it doesn't get much easier than that.

Need it to be even smaller? Unmount. Remount smaller. Re-crop. Less than 10 seconds.

I've been using it for 10 years --- including the Dark Ages when copy was going through Atex --- so maybe it's just easier for me than for others who are new to it.

 

If you're just throwing a photo in a box, it works well.

If you're trying to crop it exactly, you have to blow the dialog box up larger, and most papers aren't going to spring for a super-size monitor.

If you're trying to get the best crop on a photo, you size it in one dialog box and then have to go back to the page to change the shape. Make the box shorter or taller, and you have to go back to the cropping dialog box to move the cropping.

In Quark, you size and crop the photo in one function, on the page. You can easily zoom in or out for better views.

Our CCI was recently upgraded and the cropping function got even more herky-jerky.

A lot of the time, we do more sophisticated designs in PhotoShop or InDesign, make a jpeg or EPS, and import it as a graphic. If any copy is involved it goes out of the editorial work flow and into "catch it on the proof" mode.

In my opinion Layout Champ is about 10 years behind state-of-the-art technology.

 

My issues with some aspects of CCI aside, I never recall the sort of sticky photo cropping issues to which you are referring.