Had a great lesson yesterday on the ills of segregating media by mode of production:
1. Team's been working on a detailed narrative of its work (default: let's collaborate in Google Docs)
2. Oh, but… there's all these important visuals and juicy quotes (try a slide doc?)
Conversation
3. Awkward: slide docs are best for image-first documents, but our prose should actually be primary (well, except for two spots where it shouldn't be…)
4. Print it all out, cut it up—tape, sharpies, post-it-notes
5. Full-manual, magazine-style layout in Pages. Done in 3 hours.👌
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That way, we centered on imagery where it made sense and left images in a side column where it didn't. And we could cut quotes into the layout differently according to their emphasis in the narrative.
Realtime multiuser collab in Pages was great! Should have started there! 2018!
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Funny that even though I've got the Tufte-isms so deeply ingrained in me, I still started with tools segregating by mode of production—because they're the default. I wish it were easier to do otherwise: using Pages like this still had way more friction than making a normal doc.
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:) I'm not sure what the answer is here. I guess the broadest observation is that there's a steep cliff between word processor mode and page layout mode. Fascinating design challenge to turn that into a smooth gradient.
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Yeah, PL mode could do with more love. Probably all I should say in this forum, but you know how to find me if you have more thoughts to share.
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It may be the haze of nostalgia, but I seem to remember that Pagemaker made this very smooth. You could click, start typing, then do the layout later. InDesign relegated pure editing to a separate window.
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I think I could have done that in Pages, too—converted to Page Layout mode after I had a solid draft—but that's still segregating by mode of production, you know? Once we had scissors and tape on the table, we realized that the text and images are so intertwined…
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