PUBLISHING

ART/DESIGN CATALOGUE
The traditional workflow for an art/design catalogue is roughly the same as
the InDesign workflow described for research publications, and focused on
the production of one ‘unified’ book. The ‘new’ workflow however is based on
a highly modularized publication process. The catalogue is built up of multiple
modules or building blocks, for example different paintings, each with
its own description, all following a standardized format. By considering these
modules as separate entities and by storing, describing and tagging them as
such, it becomes possible to generate customized publications using specific
selections of the building blocks.
This also provides a solution for the problem of the publication’s file size. In
most cases, due to current limitations in bandwidth and storage space, an
art catalogue is difficult to convert one-to-one to an electronic publication
which can be downloaded within a reasonable amount of time. Therefore
it is advisable to split up the publication into smaller sub-publications, such
as monographic micro-ebooks on single art works, or collections of articles
from which each reader can individually choose, thereby automatically generating
a customized ebook. Modularized content can also lead to different
commercial strategies, for example by offering parts of a publication through
an ‘in-app’ download. An example of this is a project by the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam, which resulted in the MyHighlights app.
On a more philosophical level, we may well wonder whether a catalogue in
the traditional sense actually constitutes a desirable publication genre for
electronic publishing. It is of course interesting and exciting to consider new
forms of small and smart catalogues, such as the micro-ebooks mentioned
above. However, we will have to wait for increased storage capacity on portable
devices, as well as faster mobile network speeds, before we can start to
enjoy the full potential of these new forms. Currently, producing a high-resolution
electronic catalogue of 100 pages or more only really makes sense as a
large PDF file designed for desktop computer viewing.
Workflows
In the specific case of art and design catalogues, the following changes to the
workflow should be taken into consideration:
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