Christie's are the world's leading art business with global auction and private sales in 2008 that totalled £2.8 billion. Founded in 1766 by James Christie, Christie's conducted the greatest auctions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and today remains a popular showcase for the unique and the beautiful.

Christie's has 57 offices in 32 countries and 10 salerooms around the world including in London, New York, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Amsterdam, Dubai and Hong Kong. Offering over 450 sales annually in over 80 categories, including all areas of fine and decorative arts, jewellery, photographs, collectibles, wine, with each one of these 450 sales requiring a detailed, glossy sale catalogue.

Despite been such an old company, Christie's has always been at the forefront of new technology with high tech software such as Christie's LIVE™, its unique, real-time online bidding service and the Christie's iPhone app.

Their sale catalogues are produced in two design studios based in London and New York and with their highly detailed lot descriptions and sumptuously photographed images, place a high workload on the staff. Each catalogue is typically around 200 pages long and this means that around 90,000 pages are produced each year (or over 250 pages a day!)

Production is further complicated by the fact that sale catalogue pagination is entirely driven by the order of the lots, rather than any specific page. Changes to lot order, the addition or removal of lots, cause havoc with the pagination.

Using an adapted version of our Matrix CMS software, users can log into the system via a browser from any of the 57 offices. They can choose the rough template style they want for a given lot, or number of lots, which will generate "whiteboard" mock-ups of the pages. They then go into each of the generated "whiteboard" pages to tweak the pages further if needs be. Once they're happy with the design of the page, they flag the page as "ready for export", the system automatically creates the InDesign pages based on the mock-up, places the pictures and styled text and creates a PDF preview of the page for them to check. Amends to the text or images are handled automatically as well. This process is repeated until they're happy with the page and then a designer gives the page a quick "once over" to check it's okay.

The system has proved to be a great success trimming several days off sale catalogue production by reducing proofing and designer workload whilst providing more control to the lot managers.