So the next iteration of Quark is ready to be unleashed upon the design world and once again it seems to be focusing on its interactive and digital design features, at least in the email promotion that did the rounds. The Quark website, once you get past the image promoting the digital design aspects of Quark 9 does have two sectioned headers, one for print aspects of version 9 and one for digital publishing. The digital section, perhaps not surprisingly given the release of the iPad since Quark 8 hit the shelves, promotes the ability of creating iPad apps and publications with Quark’s App Studio, before going on to make mention of designing interactive content for the Blio eReader and exporting to Flash and HTML. The accompanying text highlights amongst other highlights the ease of converting a design from print to digital, something that given past experiences is something of a bold promise in itself and will be interesting to see exactly how well this process does work. On the other hand the export to Flash option on one hand is a slightly odd feature to highlight given Apple’s move against Flash implementation on the iPad in recent months, though given InDesign’s digital exporting tools it’s not surprising that quark would try to highlight this feature.
In the print section of the Quark 9 features site, following on from the bold claim (literally) of Quark being “The Best Professional Print Design Software Available” there’s a claim made about the print output contained within Quark 9. Now given how troublesome Quark 8 was when exporting PDFs, especially when compared to InDesign as covered in an earlier post, this is a major area that Quark needs to improve and the question remains whether lessons have been learnt from past editions of Quark that seemed to trumpet digital design features at the expense of some poor or inconsistent performances in terms of the print design and export aspects that Quark used to do simply.
In the “What’s New” features page, again after some digital trumpeting, there’s a shortlist of a few new design features that Quark 9 offers. Notably several of those features mentioned such as Story Editor and Image Grid already have comparison features existing in InDesign CS4 (nevermind the latest CS5 release), how well the Shapemaker feature will work is also something of a big question given that Quark’s handling of vector shapes is still behind that of both InDesign and Illustrator – however, Callout, a feature that allows picture boxes and groups to stay aligned to a specific point in a text box, regardless of any reflow of text in a story, is an interesting development and one that is certainly welcomed, providing of course that it does work as expected on a consistent basis.
And that is the issue that Quark, for me, still faces. InDesign has been, in my opinion, the superior programme now for several incarnations and there’s still the matter of both cost and reliability when it comes to Quark’s releases, especially in light of the problematic version 8 and the further trumpeting of digital design aspects and features. Though designers would of course welcome features that make the switch from print to digital within projects easier these features are going to be something of a waste if Quark does not perform better as a print design publication and improves on version 8. Competition for the title of best layout programme has the potential to take both InDesign and Quark to new heights, and is certainly healthier than say 15 years or so ago when Quark easily dominated the page layout design arena, but I would hope that the progress Quark, and for that matter InDesign make, is not entirely towards digital at the cost of getting things correct and consistent on the print design side of things. InDesign is for me the better of the two and it’s up to Quark to step-up once again and deliver a real challenge to Adobe and a real choice for designers everywhere in terms of a top quality programme that does the basic things well, as well as the headline effects and features.
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