So I’ve done an unofficial poll of people in higher ed, printers, graphic designers and non-profits, and found that there’s some disparity in the opinions of people in the industry about their professional page layout program of choice.
Quark has been a long-standing application used in the print and graphic design world for the development of multi-page format documents. It goes back years and years, and for a long time had only a minor competitor in Pagemaker (which, honestly, never really compared). In general, there are mixed feelings about Quark. Alot of higher ed institutions are torching the program – it’s difficult to upgrade, and Quark has always been incredibly stingy with their upgrades and educational pricing. Alot of higher eds I spoke to simply said that they might keep a class or two that utilizes Quark, to simply keep it in the mix for posterity’s sake, but I wonder how long that will last.
Professionals seemed split – designers say about 50% of their clients are using or requesting Quark. Nonprofits seem the most disparate – many people are using Quark, InDesign, or possibly still using Pagemaker or even lower end products that weren’t really intended for large scale document design and development.
InDesign was released years back as part of the evolving Adobe Creative Suite. Honestly, Adobe went about it in all the right ways – releasing a product that was part of a package, cheaply priced, and with GUI so similar to the powerful Photoshop and Illustrator, that designers found themselves comfortable with it almost immediately. The packaging, the price, the ease of use, all seem to connect and more higher eds and non-profits seem to be leaning towards the Adobe compatible product line.
Printers seem indifferent. Many of them request PDF files over anything at this point, (especially for smaller documents), so the authoring software is irrelevant.
In the end, there seems to be a common consensus – if you know and understand design conceptually, it doesn’t matter which product you use – InDesign, Quark, letterpress, camera, it just doesn’t matter. Good Design, is Good Design, despite the tool you use to create it.
