TheFactory an overview of editorial toolchains

This website presents a selection of editorial projects that are part of a professional production toolchain, involving the printing of several hundred or even thousands of copies by printers. Excluding practices related to fanzines or micro-publishing, the cases studied are part of a structured publishing process with large-scale distribution.

The projects under consideration have a variety of editorial characteristics: some stand out for their rich text, others for their emphasis on images, as in exhibition catalogs, and still others for the complexity of their layout or production, as in the case of Médor magazine. There are also approaches where an entire collection is produced using web-to-print, as is the case with the Interventions collection from C&F édition, or publications where each work is designed according to the same principle, but without the use of tools such as Paged.js, as is the case with Abrüpt éditions. All these projects are part of a contemporary approach that combines graphic design and digital technologies, and share a desire to work in a spirit of documentation, open resources, collaboration, and sharing.

This overview is based in particular on the research work of Julie Blanc (Composing with web technologies¹, Antoine Fauchié (Fabriquer des éditions. Éditer des fabriques²), Yann Trividic’s presentation of collaborative publishing projects as part of EPE at Ésad Valence³ and the web to print library archive⁴.