One of the challenges involved with producing the Herriot-Watt Student Handbook was working with the extensive colour palette employed by the designer.

Each chapter featured an geometric illustration which then governed the chapter text colours. From this, emerged two questions:
1) How to keep the colours consistent between Illustrator and InDesign?
2) How to change the colour scheme for each chapter, whilst keeping the style sheets uniform and editable?

I love problem solving! This one was quite easy.

I used a master swatch library in Illustrator (actually not fun, considering how you creatives 'create' using any sort of colour range) which I then imported into InDesign.

I then created a master document template which I used as the starting point for each chapter. I saved each chapter as a separate document. By replacing the original colours with the designated chapter colours, this instantly modified the "parent" style sheet and the "child" style sheet was born.

To finish it off I created a book in InDesign and loaded each chapter in and was able to synchronize bringing all of my colours and stylesheets together as one big happy family.

One other dilemma I faced with this project was creating the course time-tables. Unsurprisingly, the content of the tables changed after I designed them and of course there was now too much copy. Because I had created cell styles this was quite easy to resolve. With almost 20 pages of tables, what could have taken a whole day to sort out, took a minimal amount of time to fix.

Design by Stephen Kelman at Freight Design