If you've worked at a newspaper sometime in the past 20 years, you've probably had a run-in with The Pagination System. That big, clunky behemoth of a computer system obviously designed by engineers who hardly ever looked at a newspaper, much less knew how one was put together. It is, for us designers, the thing we most love to hate. It's obtuse, slow, counterintuitive, and does in fifteen complicated steps what a Mac can do with a command-T. But oddly, once you get the hang of it, it cranks out all those inside ad-stack pages like nobody's business. We designers spend a lot of time talking about Quark and InDesign and the beautiful things they can do, but the fact is that if we had to use them to paginate every page of the paper, people would be getting their Sunday paper on Thursday afternoon. As much as they turn us prematurely gray, CCI, DTI, Unisys, Harris, Coyote, etc., get the paper out the door every night.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to saying that Jonathon Berlin of SND's Design magazine would like you newspaper folks out there to take a survey about your pagination system and how it makes you feel. Or something like that. It'll be therapeutic, and we'll all gain a little knowledge.

>Take the pagination survey [SND.org]