“I wish Quark would pick up on some new things,” Baumgarten says, “but for workability and workflow, Quark is still faster than InDesign.”Īnother Quark loyalist is Mark Flaherty, senior print production coordinator for Beverly, MA-based women’s apparel merchant Appleseed’s. Ed Baumgarten, a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, says that InDesign is overly complex, to the point that productivity suffers.
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Indeed, even Graffam, who calls himself “a total convert,” admits, “There are things in InDesign that I haven’t even discovered yet.”Īnd some InDesign detractors view the program’s multitude of features as a drawback.
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According to Hansen, InDesign is far more difficult to master than Quark.
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“If you understand how the software works,” Hansen says, “InDesign allows you to work much faster and usually does things right the first time.” Quark loyalistsīut that “if” is a major reason more designers haven’t made the switch from Quark. “You’d have to open up a separate PhotoShop program and then go back into Quark.” InDesign also lets you manipulate images with transparencies and drop shadows, whereas with Quark you have to switch back and forth between Adobe, PhotoShop, and Illustrator to get similar results. “You could never do that in Quark,” he says. Graffam, for instance, praises InDesign’s “eye dropper” tool, which allows you to click on a photograph, translate it into cyan/magenta/yellow/black (CMYK) colors - the mode required for the printing - and then place it in your layout. Hansen says many have embraced the newer software’s improved functionality. The ease of creating PDFs isn’t the only reason some designers favor InDesign. Schmid switched its design protocol over to InDesign in April 2005.
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PDF technology has changed the way we do work.” J. “Now with InDesign you can make a type change and e-mail the PDF back. Before you had to overnight or fax color proofs, Neimuth says. “PDFs are absolutely the way work is done now. Schmid & Associates, also prefers InDesign over Quark because of the former’s facility with PDFs. Quark, he continues, often has so many subwindows that it can be difficult to see the image you’re creating.īrent Neimuth, creative director/brand strategist for Mission, KS-based catalog consultancy J. While Quark 6.0, introduced in 2004, does allow designers to import PDFs easily, Graffam says that InDesign can create a high-resolution PDF immediately so that you can see what the PDF will look like as it’s going to print. With InDesign, you don’t have these issues, because it’s actually part of the Adobe line of software.” “You have to save a Quark document in Adobe and then drag it into the distiller. “In Quark, creating PDFs has always been hit or miss,” says Graffam, whose creative department switched from Quark to InDesign in February 2005. In fact, he sees the program’s ability to readily create PDFs as its biggest advantage. InDesign advocatesĮric Graffam, associate art director for Portland, ME-based bedding and decor cataloger Cuddledown of Maine, says that InDesign’s early difficulties with PDFs are long over. Then again, when Quark 5.0 was released in 2002, you couldn’t place PDFs in that program at all, he adds. “It was difficult to get PDFs and not have issues - instances where files were removed if you tried to select individual elements,” he recalls. When InDesign launched in 1999, some dubbed it “the Quark Killer” Hansen says, but the program had some significant problems at first.