Let’s get the tough part out of the way: I went to the QuarkXPress 7 launch event as a skeptic; I came home impressed. Very impressed! Not only did I learn about the application, but I better understood how Quark is positioning itself opposite Adobe InDesign and the Adobe Creative Suite.
This is not a review; that will appear on Creativepro in a few weeks. (For an in-depth look at the QuarkXPress 7 beta, see Jay Nelson’s article.) But whether you use QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign, the following report will give you insight into who’s ahead in the page-layout game.
A Full-Day Event
The special invitation for the unveiling of QuarkXPress 7 brought me and about 350 others to New York City’s Puck building in SOHO. The meeting rooms included more than fifty iMacs for a hands-on lab; circular pods housing software partners and XTension developers; and a main hall with about 450 chairs.
While the crowd filled up much of the main hall, there were empty seats along the sides. This was very different from the old days of Quark, when it would have been standing room only. Similarly, while the hands-on class sign-up sheets filled up almost immediately, there were many no-shows and the class I attended was barely half full.
Precise Transparency
My day started at 8 A.M. with a detailed demonstration of the new features in XPress 7. These included the much touted “color-level transparency.” (Terrible name, great idea.)
In XPress 7, anything that can have a color assigned to it can also have its own transparency or drop shadow. This means that the fill for a text box can have transparency while the text within stays solid. Even a single character within a text frame, or a cell within a table, can have its own transparency setting. This leapfrogs InDesign CS2’s transparency controls. (Perhaps that’s why Adobe has already spread the news that CS3 will have a similar controls for transparency.)
Composition Zones
I was also impressed by composition zones, which let one person farm out areas of a page to others to work on. This ability is fantastic for, say, senior art directors who want an underling to create the coupon or boiler-plate copy for an ad. There are some limitations, as you’d expect in a version 1 feature. For instance, the person working on the small portion of the page doesn’t know what the rest of the page looks like.
However, Canto, the maker of the digital asset management tool Cumulus, demonstrated two new products that integrate these composition zones into a company’s digital asset management system. This allows composition zones to be stored, managed, updated, and inserted directly from the Cumulus window within XPress.
Job Jackets
At the risk of sounding like an ad for Sears, “I came for something transparent and went away with a jacket.” The new Job Jacket feature in XPress 7 combines all the qualities of preflight with best practices and branding guidelines, then pushes all of it upstream where the designer can apply it quickly and easily.
Job Jackets are created for various types of projects and can contain “tickets” that specify different output parameters. Thus, a job jacket for a new corporate ad campaign can have individual tickets for ads, spot color brochures, even Web pages. (Remember, several documents types can be in a single QuarkXPress project.)
I’ve sat in many conference rooms as production, editorial, and design department managers have worked on “best practices” for layouts. This can mean anything from the proper resolution and color guidelines to which fonts to use. In the past, companies couldn’t electronically check documents for adherence to those best practices.
Job Jackets make it not only possible to check, but simple. The designer merely chooses the command to evaluate the document, then the Job Jacket checks the file. The designer can then make whatever changes are necessary.
Job Jackets are XML-based. Rather than ask designers to write XML code, Quark envisions that companies’ production managers will create the custom Job Jackets.
Intel Mac Version
In January of this year, Quark promised to distribute a public beta of the Universal Binary version of XPress 7. It eventually kept that promise, though the Universal Binary beta came much later than the Power PC beta. That pattern is repeating itself. While the release of QuarkXPress 7 ended the Power PC and Windows beta programs, the beta for the Universal Binary continues. Quark says that it will release the Mactel-friendly version of the software this summer. It will be a free upgrade for Mac users.
Reaction of the Crowd
Perhaps I’ve been enmeshed too much in the insular community of InDesign users and trainers. I haven’t met a QuarkXPress user in several years. Yet the launch event was filled with die-hard Quarkers who were thrilled to be there. A random sampling of the crowd indicated that most would immediately upgrade to version 7. Many were QuarkXPress 4 users who had sat out upgrades to 5, 6, and 6.5, but version 7 has finally given them compelling reasons to move.
Almost without exception, every designer and art director I spoke to mentioned transparency as their primary reason for switching. However, they also mentioned that if there was any indication that transparency in XPress 7 didn’t output correctly, it would be the death-knell for XPress. They didn’t wait all that time for the feature if it wasn’t going to work correctly.
I was also interested to find a lot of freelancers who told me they now use both QuarkXPress and InDesign because half their clients have moved to InDesign while the other half have stayed with XPress.
The Kindler, Gentler Quark
The features for XPress weren’t the only good news at the event. Quark has dropped the price significantly. Version 6 sold for $1,045; version 7 sells for $749! The upgrade price is $249, whether you own version 3 or version 6.5. This is a big change from previous corporate policy, which charged more when you upgraded from older versions.
Also, version 7 comes with a complete, printed user manual, and a training DVD from lynda.com. With versions 5 and 6, you had to pay $50 extra for a printed manual. English technical support will be free with the product.
I was pleased to see great attitudes from XPress executives and staff. They really cared about their customers and were anxious to hear comments and complaints, as well as compliments. There was no defensiveness.
The Future of Page-Layout Software
Will QuarkXPress regain its overwhelming dominance of the page-layout market? I think those days are over. Too many companies have already switched to InDesign. I don’t believe a company that switched to InDesign will switch again to QuarkXPress 7. There are just too many considerations and complications. And it’s not just InDesign’s own features that have made it attractive; it’s the integration between all the Creative Suite products.
But will QuarkXPress whither and blow away? Absolutely not! Version 7’s feature set offers more than enough reasons for many shops to stay in the XPress family. And the fact that Quark has done more than just mimic InDesign’s feature set shows innovative thinkers are working on the application, which bodes well for its future.
Do you remember the freelancers I spoke to who need to work in both programs? They’re the best indication of the future of page-layout software. They show that it’s no longer a single-program world. Some companies will be Quark shops, others will be InDesign. The most desirable creative pros will be fluent in both QuarkXPress and InDesign.
My prediction is that although Quark will lose market share to Adobe, it will also retain a good portion of its user base. There will be no “winner” — it’s going to be a two-sided game.
This article was last modified on January 10, 2022
This article was first published on May 24, 2006
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