This week while I was doing a small job in large agency located in downtown Philadelphia, I ran across, or was reacquainted with one of the most annoying things I come across as a freelance designer. An agency STILL using QuarkXpress!

For those of you not in the industry this will sound like the rantings of a snotty, high on his horse designer. Most of my fellow designers will agree with me, although I know there are still Quark purists out there that will most certainly take their digs. If you are not in the industry and want to learn more about the battle between Quark and InDesign check out this website for the complete history.

We all know that Quark was the “go to” application for print layout and production for years. It was not until Adobe created InDesign that we graphic designers finally had a choice of professional layout software. This designer was so happy on that day.

Now granted, the agency I was working at did not have the most updated version of Quark but they refused to make the switch to InDesign (although they have it); do to most of their past work being laid out in Quark. That being said I think I was working in Quark 6.1. Now the layout I was doing was by all means simple; 4 images on a gradient background with some type being used as descriptors. The output for these lovely’s was to be 31” by 48” no problem right? Wrong!

Because Quark will not let you make a document larger that 48” it is almost impossible to make a bleed on the output because that would mean you would need at least 49 inches to give a ½ inch bleed. Okay, no problem, just scale everything down a bit and tell the print house to scale it up during output. Next problem.

In order to make these images stand out I wanted to give them simple drop shadows. Oh, wait, Quark cannot do that, not this version. If I used a downloaded XTension for Quark that created drop shadows it would either create 10% black boxes behind my objects, reminiscent of MS Publisher of old, or create Gaussian images that only had one background color which was white. Sorry folks that will not work, because if you have been paying attention, I needed a gradient background. Solution to this problem: copy and paste all the image boxes to another page, line them up and fill them all black, save the page as an EPS and then import that EPS into a large resolution Photoshop file; remember this is 48 inches wide. Once in Photoshop get rid of all the white area, create a background layer with a gradient of your favorite PMS colors, select your black boxes layer and apply a drop shadow and set the fill for that layer to 0%. Save it all as a TIF and place in Quark scaling it up to the size you need and lining the drop shadow areas up with your image boxes. Whew! If you are still reading you are probably saying “What the hell?”

Now, as I understand it Quark 7.0 allows for transparencies and drop shadows. Wow Quark, it only took you 21 years to bring the most overused, basic graphic design, special effect there has ever been into your software. InDesign has been the contemporary of Quark since 1999 and although the first version was not the most desirable, it still allowed you to make simple drop shadows!

Lets move on to more annoying features that make using Quark a pain in the ass. I think we will start with usability. In Quark you can layout type very easily, but once you want to edit that type you cannot just double click the bounding box it is contained in. Oh no, you have to go over to the tool bar select the Type Edit tool, bring your cursor back to the box and THEN you can edit your type. Double clicking any box in Quark brings up the Modify Object dialog box. This is one of the most annoying things in the program, I am not going to get into it but if you have used the software you may know what I am talking about.

Another usability drawback is the Pan tool which is not the same hot key as it is in Illustrator or Photoshop, nope it is something totally different. There is nothing like jumping back and forth from app to app confused about which shortcut keys to use.

Next let’s go to Applying Style Sheets. In InDesign all I have to do to apply a style sheet to any text object is select the object and click on which style sheet I want in the Style Sheet Palette. In Quark I have to marquee or select all the text in that box and then choose my style sheet. Not to mention that I have to be using the Text/Item Selection tool. Oh, did I also mention that if I want to change the style sheet I cannot just double click on the style sheet name in the palette, nope I have to go to Edit > Style Sheets and then select which style sheet I want.

More problems: No drag and drop from other programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, hard to use color palette, poor Layer handling, unforgiving Bezier tool, pain in the ass type editing and font selection and most of all shitty UI. Do you want me to go on?

Look this is a rant by a frustrated designer who is also a hardcore computer user and developer. Tools are supposed to be efficient, and evolve to suit the best user environment they possibly can. Quark just has refused to do this with QuarkXpress in a way that I, and I stress that I, meaning ME, MYSELF, finds efficient.

Quark I never liked you, I had to use you because you were the only thing around for years. When your enemy InDesign came waving its flag of seamless Adobe product features, usability, and over all efficiency; I checked it out and found that it did everything I wished you did, and so much more. Now my workflow is quicker and less frustrating and has been since I put you second on my list back in 99. I will still use you sometimes to appease those who want me to; but until you start coming out with some real evolution to your layout capabilities, my shit is InDesign!

Disclaimer: This was written as a complaint to no one in particular about my dislike for a tool reluctantly in my arsenal. Since I have not used the newest release of QuarkXpress my views are a bit biased. Also since I am not a regular user of Quark I am not familiar with all of its shortcuts, hotkeys and secrets. That being said if you read this and want to educate me on some of these issues by all means do so. I am not a stubborn designer; I like to work with tools that work best with me. If you can show me that Quark CAN work with me better I am all ears!