WWW.LIFETOUCH.COM
Greetings from the BPI editorial staff — we wish you a healthy and prosperous 2019! Beginning with a combined January–February issue somehow makes the year seem to be speeding by right from the start. We are immersed now in the first radical redesign of our magazine since the publication’s founding in 2003. Some aspects proceed smoothly; others, not so much. You see with this issue a new cover design that ties us in with our KNect365 event brands. You’ll see similar changes on our eBooks and featured reports as well.
But then . . . we thought we knew enough about fonts and their licensing. As fun as they are to play with, and as much as some can help publications to look and feel “modern,” a number of fonts are less technically viable for print than others. Late last year, our technical editor efficiently revised all our templates based on a short list of official font choices from a corporate rebranding effort. We quickly started using them with editorial glee — only to find out a week before going to production that our main display font was not acceptable to our printer.
You can imagine the mad scramble that ensued among our larger team of designers, editors, and production folk. As a result, this issue uses some “new” and some “old” fonts until we find a replacement that won’t make our printer run for the hills. In other words, there are more changes to come! This process helps us sympathize for those who work in the industry as project managers — as well as those involved in change control. How complicated it can be to ensure that all necessary information gets to all stakeholders while maintaining documentation chains for efficient troubleshooting! In our case, we forgot to include the liaison with our printer, of all things — an omission that almost derailed our shipping schedule. Thank goodness we editors handle type and ink and digital bits and bytes rather than drug substances and products.
A more positive element of the redesign process has been that it highlights some internal relationships that BPI has always enjoyed, but that haven’t been operationally coordinated (we’re not so siloed now) or fully visible outside our company. Combining previously separate operating groups (BPI magazine and conference programs) into one division (KNect365) has opened for us a number of surprising synergies, most notably some increased opportunities to bring content into the publication from our conference programs and related interviews. Some such content is derived from transcripts of recordings; other elements come from intense editorial note-taking and follow-up with speakers.
We’ve already replaced our “Spotlight” section with selections from editor Dan Stanton’s more timely BioProcess Insider features. And although we welcome manuscripts from the entire industry, our ability now to publish manuscripts adapted from well-received presentations at KNect365 events gives us the ability we’ve long wanted to expand their audiences while honoring also the hard review work of conference advisory boards. Our projects for 2019 will expand on this approach to content through projects with other event sponsors, as we seek to bring a combined voice and set of experiences to the industry.