*** From the Archives ***

This article is from December 31, 2002, and is no longer current.

2002: The Creative Year in Review

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As 2002 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the year that was. Creativepro.com asked its frequent contributors to assess the year from the viewpoints of technological developments, industry trends, and personal challenges. A few themes emerged: the rise of InDesign as viable competition to QuarkXPress, the adoption of Mac OS X and the subsequent migration to OS X-ready applications, and the struggle of many creative professionals to carve out a living in a challenging economy.

Bleak Prospects, Bold Predictions: Eric J. Adams
On the business front there is one and only one pertinent question: Recovery, what recovery? Pundits had predicted a thaw for the spring of ’02, the summer of ’02, and the fall of ’02. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Now they’re talking spring ’03, but I think this economy is a sleeping dog that’s going to need more than a few swift kicks to wake up. And even then, time will pass before companies feel confident enough to reinvigorate their marketing efforts and sail full steam ahead. The dot.coms are never coming back, and there’s no breakout technology or media revolution to jumpstart the industry. Bottom line, the recovery is still a year away, more if there’s war.

For creative professionals, this means 2003 will be a year of treading water, exploring new ways to create business, and above all, keeping current clients happy.
Bold business predictions: This will be the last year for Seybold Seminars; expect a major merger among the likes of Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, or other industry players; and clients will come to understand PDF.

Read Eric J. Adams’s Art of Business columns for 2002.

Waking Up to InDesign: David Blatner
For me, there was only one really big technology story of the past year: 2002 was the year I woke up from a fitful slumber called “QuarkXPress in OS 9” and started using Adobe InDesign in Mac OS X. I don’t seem to be alone, as companies large and small are beginning to make the switch to an application and an operating system fit for the 21st century.

Of course, there were a plethora of smaller-yet-important stories, including the rapid growth of 802.11b (WiFi) wireless technology (connecting using wires now seems soooo retro to me), and the astonishing drop in hard-drive prices (I can’t believe I cannot find a single use for an “old” 6 GB FireWire drive in my office). I’m looking forward to 2003, when Bluetooth wireless technology might make a similarly strong showing, and we finally find out if XPress 6 is Quark’s saving grace or its nail in the coffin.

Read more by David Blatner.

A Palindrome Year: Sandee Cohen
As a palindrome year, it was hard to tell if we were coming or going during 2002. Certainly the year started off with a bang with the almost simultaneous (only seven days apart) releases of QuarkXPress 5 and InDesign 2. For the first few months of their releases, the competition was hot and heavy between the two programs. Most reviewers gave InDesign high marks while the scores for QuarkXPress were a little less positive. By the end of the year, though, the most scathing comment on the success of QuarkXPress was an e-mail from Quark Inc. offering QuarkXPress 4.1 for sale. Oh well, if you can’t sell the new product, sell the old one.

2002 was also the year of the X-factor. One by one, major applications for the Macintosh were ported over to the OS X platform. One by one, the major Adobe applications were available for OS X. For the most part, the transitions were smooth. Products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were upgraded with new versions that worked on both OS 9 and OS X. Sadly, the upgrade for Acrobat 5 was not quite as smooth. A free patch upgraded Acrobat from 5.0 to 5.0.5. Unfortunately not all Acrobat features are available in OS X. Distiller, the catalog features, and page transitions are not available on the OS X platform. Also, there is no plug-in to allow PDF files to be viewed within any OS X browsers. The irony of this is that the Mac OS X platform itself using a variation of PDF as its Quartz display. Too bad there are so many problems for Acrobat itself. Acrobat users are looking forward to 2003 for the next version, which should fix all these problems.

The year was also a year of shakeups in the world of conferences and expos. Perhaps the saddest was the disappointing turnout for Seybold San Francisco in September. Even before the show was finished, the word was out that the spring Seybold show in New York was cancelled. Even more bad news for New Yorkers came with the news that starting in 2004, Macworld Expo would be moving its summer show back to Boston. With a new convention center, Beantown made an offer that the Big Apple just couldn’t match.

So what’s on the horizon for next year? Well, the rumor mills are churning up the news that Quark Inc. will be announcing if not unveiling its OS X version of QuarkXPress at January’s Macworld. So the year ends just as it started — a palindrome.

Read Sandee Cohen’s Digital Dish columns for 2002.

Dealing with the Digital Deluge: Bruce Fraser
I mostly missed 2002 because I spent it writing and producing two books — Real World Photoshop 7 and Real World Color Management — while buying, moving into, and renovating a house, but one development penetrated the chaos. 2002 was the year when the issue with digital photography changed from quality concerns to how to handle the sheer volume of data.
Epson delivered Ultrachrome, a pigment-based inkset that largely solved the problem of obvious color shifting under different light sources while offering a gamut approaching that of their dye-based inks, and also came up with a fairly nifty line of printers to put that ink on paper. Canon, Nikon, and Fuji all delivered cameras producing image quality that rivals medium-format film, while Kodakcontinues to tantalize with promises, but no delivery, of almost 14 megapixels for less than $5k. Basically, the quality for digital photography is here, now, on both the input and output sides.

Now the problem for digital shooters becomes one of dealing with all the data. It’s a whole lot easier to make initial edits and selects from 200 medium-format chromes on a light table than it is to do so from 200 digital captures from 6-megapixel cameras — the processing time alone on 200 raw camera files can easily eat a couple of hours just to be able to see the images.

So for me, the most significant development in 2002 was Adobe’s announcement of the CameraRAW plug-in, which promises to suck images into Photoshop (and particularly, Photoshop’s File Browser) instead of having to use either the camera vendor’s standalone apps or their notoriously slow plug-ins. Of course, they still have to ship it, but if they can deliver on their promises, they’ll put the “photo” back in Photoshop in a big way by making it the first destination for the millions of digital images that will be created in 2003.

Read more by Bruce Fraser.

Missed Opportunities, Great Expectations: Susan Glinert
After poking around my shelves of software, I have to admit that 2002 was a graphics yawner. Photoshop 7, CorelDRAW 11, FrameMaker 7, and Ventura 10 all made an appearance, but with the sole exception of the new File Browser and Healing Brush in Photoshop, the new features in these programs were about as electrifying as boiled tofu. Both Frame and Ventura sported new features for XML publishing, but without sufficient intro-level documentation, the majority of publishing pros will find the entire process murky at best.

2002 did find me at the end of my patience with my venerable Epson Stylus 3000, whose balky, integrated printhead clogged up yet again and this time was totally resistant to every cleaning regimen that the Internet could offer. It cost more to fix than to buy a new printer and this time, I went for a Canon S9000 and am truly delighted with its performance. The photo-quality printing is indistinguishable from film output and it’s blazingly fast. Best of all, if the printhead clogs up, I can remove it for serious cleaning. And if worse comes to worse, I can toss it and buy a new one.

My wishes for 2003:

  1. Adobe actually reads the FrameMaker forum Wish List and picks the top 20 requests for FrameMaker 8. And throws in Unicode and OpenType support for good measure.
  2. CorelDRAW adds a double-line tool — I’ve been asking for it since version 1.
  3. InDesign steals FrameMaker’s long document publishing tools. Or FrameMaker steals InDesign’s type tools. I don’t care which.
  4. Somebody produces an intelligent program that can accurately map styles in pre-existing desktop publishing templates and generates a flawless DTD without laborious input from the overworked compositor.
  5. The publishing industry realizes that asking readers to pay $15 for a non-paper, non-ink, non-cover e-book that requires no warehouse storage and is not subject to returns is called stealing.

Read more by Susan Glinert.


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  • chasf says:

    I’ve been reading with some interest writers such as David Blatner and Sandee Cohen singing the praises of InDesign while chastising poor, unimaginative QuarkXpress. I suppose over the years Quark has not been its own best champion. Pretty stodgy. Set in its ways. I wish for a better table editor, for instance. Transparency. Fuzzy drop shadows. The next level, perhaps, of typographical controls. It seems this time that InDesign has sped ahead of Quark in every aspect but one. It’s a simple one, but one I’m finding it more important with every InDesign job I do:

    Quark works.

    InDesign (often) doesn’t.

    What do I mean by “works”? Quark makes plates that can be used on a press to bring my conceptions to reality. Each color, every element, goes its proper way into its proper place, ultimately finding its way into a printed piece that pleases my customers and keeps them coming back. Even more than that, it pleases my boss who continues to make enough money to keep me employed.

    InDesign? It makes really pretty pages–on the screen. Its direct export of PDF is usually at odds with the real world of production, often not working at all. Often crashing my platesetter. All of this causes heartburn. This is something I’m not sure reviewers who are comparing InDesign’s built-in PDF generation with Quark’s Distiller-based feature know about. In my industry (medium-sized printers), Distiller provides the consistent workflow we need for efficiency and profitability. It’s possible to use Distiller with InDesign, but it pouts when you do (double-click on a .ps file generated by InDesign and up comes the InDesign program–not, as one would expect, Distiller).

    What about OS X? I think Gene Gable’s right that this issue is “more emotional than real” (/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/story_images/feature/18378.html). We in the printing industry are a lot like those Windows NT network guys that want to keep what works and let the newer things prove their worth–and work out their bugs.

    Adobe, obviously, is not finished working out its vision for InDesign, but it has its work cut out for it. In heavy-duty ink on paper applications, Quark has nothing to fear from the current generation of InDesign.

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