Introduces designers to Scripps College Journal’s design and brand system, prepares their computer, places submitted work in the magazine, and exports the issue for print & web — all quickly and easily.
Boasting tight integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, the app installs fonts, configures InDesign’s layout, and shows designers around the latest SCJ brand guides — all while maintaining a neat folder structure, so multiple designers’ work is always ready for merging.
Placing work in the issue is as simple as drag-and-drop, leaving more time for creativity. Don’t worry about digging through the magazine’s included paragraph styles — stories and poems are typeset correctly like magic. Visual artwork is sized manageably and predictably, ready for precise arrangement.
Upon the designer’s request, the app creates packages for print (or web) formatted to specification for our print house, with appropriate color management, image resolution, and trim marks — all automatically. No dealing with export dialogs or reviewing proof errors.
The app keeps the brand guides on the design team’s computers up to date, and implements the senior designer’s changes — making it easy to deploy new fonts, or revised InDesign settings, to the whole team instantly. It can update itself with bug fixes and new features, and downloads Creative Cloud when it’s not already installed.
Open the downloaded installer on your Mac.
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Drag Scripps College Journal into Applications.
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Open the Applications folder, and open the SCJ app. You’ll see a warning. Click Cancel.
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Open System Preferences, and go to Security & Privacy.
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In the General tab, click the Open Anyway button near the bottom.
Running for the first time
For the app to work, please grant access when your Mac prompts you. It will ask about Finder, System Events, Preview, InDesign, Documents, and Downloads.
The first time it runs, it will download the design guides.
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Updates existing SCJ brand design guides to the newest ones when available
- Along with revisions to the design guides, any changes to typefaces, export settings, or other configuration files are automatically implemented
- Senior designer can deploy sweeping design changes to entire team’s computers quickly and easily, in a way users can’t miss
- No effort on the part of the user, and highly reduced effort for senior designer compared to manual alternatives
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Installs our latest brand fonts
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Injects more convenient custom Adobe InDesign interface layout tailored to magazine design
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Rapidly and easily places writing pieces, like short stories and poems, into your design completely formatted
- Dragging a Word document onto the SCJ Dock icon will place the written piece onto the active page of the magazine’s InDesign document.
- It will automatically select the right text box, typeset the text correctly — including font, type size, leading, and formatting — in the SCJ style, and reflow the text onto multiple pages if the text boxes are linked.
- No more opening Word and manually copying & pasting text from documents repeatedly, fussing with strange formatting, and manually applying paragraph styles. It’s all automatic, quick, and convenient.
- Format for either poetry or prose pieces using the design guide’s included InDesign paragraph styles
- Option to attempt to retain italics, which avoids having to redo them manually, if the source document is formatted correctly
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Places visual artwork into your design conveniently
- Dragging one piece onto the SCJ Dock icon will — along with moving it to the correct folder — place it in the magazine’s InDesign document, if it’s open.
- Unlike InDesign’s native place function, SCJ will place artwork on the document in a manageable size, with a proportionally fitted frame, to ensure that the piece is not clipped or distorted.
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Automatic magazine export
- When you’re done with your pages, drag the InDesign file onto the SCJ Dock icon, and click Send Pages to Senior Designer. You’ll have the option to email the created files.
- When you’re done with the magazine, drag the InDesign file onto the SCJ Dock icon, and click Export Magazine for Print. The magazine will be packaged automatically with properly formatted, sized and colored print PDFs that matches our print house’s specifications, a PDF suitable for digital viewing, the InDesign .indd master file, and an .idml XML archive file compatible with InDesign CS4, along with all of the typeface files and artwork used in the issue.
- Cuts down or completely eliminates diagnosing and rectifying print proofing errors. Preserves institutional memory, so that information on preparing files for Claremont Print is not lost.
- No repeatedly messing with package export dialogs or obscure color profile settings that the average student designer might not know about.
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Moves the issue’s artwork into the correct folder
- When leadership provides the visual artwork selected for use in the Journal, it needs to go into the Artwork folder. (We all work with one set of artwork that was accepted for this year’s issue. That way, when we split up the issue for multiple designers to work on, we don’t need to relink the artwork every time.)
- With the Scripps College Journal app, you can drag all the images you download onto its Dock icon, and it’ll move those files to the correct folder automatically. Therefore, the links to the artwork remain intact for the senior designer, who combines everyone’s work.
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Built-in fast app upgrades bring new features and bug fixes
- Scripps College Journal will notify you when a new version of the SCJ app is available, and offer to quickly install the update before relaunching. You can choose to do so later if you want.
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Get Adobe Creative Cloud
- If you don’t have Creative Cloud installed, Scripps College Journal will download it for you.
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Synchronizes Adobe software versions across the team with auto-updating compatibility rules
- If each member of the design team uses different versions of InDesign, the work they create will not be compatible. To prevent this issue from occurring, Scripps College Journal will notify users with out-of-date InDesign installations before they start working, and provide them with clear instructions on how to rectify the issue.
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Announcement or staff news delivered on app launch
- The senior designer can choose to display information that will be delivered to the team quietly in Notification Center, or as an alert.
macOS Mojave or later
Adobe Creative Cloud 2021
2 GB of free space recommended, 0.2 GB required
Software requirements will automatically change every year starting in 2023 until 2027 Why?
I’m on Windows. How do I access the design system?
Unfortunately, we don’t have an app for Windows. On a PC, download the design guide package directly.
Everything you need to build Scripps College Journal, including our InDesign and Illustrator brand guides, font files, PDF export presets, and InDesign workspace, is still included.
During setup, you will have to open each file manually. For example, you’ll move the issue’s artwork into the Artwork folder using Windows Explorer, install the included fonts on your PC by right-clicking on them, and export your final PDFs using InDesign’s standard export dialog. Because there is no app to mandate any Adobe compatibility rules, please speak with a member of your team to ensure you use the correct versions of InDesign and Illustrator.
(Note: On Windows, be sure to import the included SCJ-specific PDF export presets before exporting any PDFs. This is absolutely mandatory if you are creating a final print file, so that the magazine prints correctly. Then when you use InDesign's export PDF dialog box, you must select the corresponding “Scripps College Journal” preset.
On a Mac, the SCJ app performs all these configuration steps for you in the background. It imports the PDF presets as you use it, and it exports the magazine automatically using the correct color profile, resolution and format for our print house, bypassing any InDesign dialog boxes.)
Lastly, while you won’t be able to place writing as quickly without the SCJ app, the well-documented InDesign paragraph styles included in our magazine design guide make reformatting placed text straightforward.
How do I make sure I have the latest version of the design guides?
The app notifies you on startup if your design guides have been superseded by newer ones, and you’ll be given the option to update them. To check their status, click the About button on the main Welcome screen.
Why do the software requirements increase year to year?
Adobe software only supports the last 3 years of macOS releases, and Apple typically supports Macs with new macOS upgrades for up to 7 years (though not always). Effectively, our workflow typically supports Macs up to 10 years old.
For example, in 2022, the SCJ app requires Adobe Creative Cloud 2021, which in turn requires a minimum of macOS Mojave 10.14, which can be installed for free on Mac models from 2012 or newer.
Staying one year behind the latest Adobe Creative Cloud release ensures that we stay up-to-date with lab and dorm computers in classrooms and residence halls at Scripps College. Deviating from adherence to the Scripps ITS upgrade cycle could potentially cause file incompatibilities when transferring files to and from lab computers.
These gradually increasing requirements pause in 2027.
I don’t have an Adobe subscription.
Adobe student licenses are provided to current Scripps College students at no extra cost. The SCJ app will walk you through the process if you don’t have Creative Cloud installed already.
Why are there multiple steps for initial installation, which include warnings from macOS?
This app is entirely student-developed. Apple has a master list of ‘known safe apps,’ which don’t require installation steps 3 and 4.
To get on that list, we have briefly discussed this matter with Apple, and concluded that we will not continue to pursue it at this time due to our limited organizational capacity during the pandemic.
For senior designers
When deploying an updated design guide, the Assets Version file and the Assets zip folder in the Scripps College Journal organizational repository here on GitHub, and the SCJ Design Version file in the zip itself all need to be updated.
To ship a new design guide, download the Assets folder, make your changes, update the SCJ Design Version hidden file, re-zip the folder, and then push it to GitHub using the GitHub Desktop app.
To prompt the SCJ app to issue a new design guide revision to your team, update the Assets Version file’s version number in the organization’s Design Resources repository. The app then fetches the newest guides and installs them on your design team’s computers.
Within the Assets folder, the app will install whatever font files exist in the fonts folder, inject whatever Adobe configuration files are present, and use the version of the design guide that is present.
(Beta) Signing in as a managing editor in the app will disable Adobe and macOS compatibility checks on that machine. Use at your own risk.
You can use the Announcements feature, located in Scripps College Journal’s Preferences repository, to relay brief information and news to your team when they launch the app, even only on a specific day.