Friday, March 03, 2006
The Tabbie Awards, Quark and InDesign
TABPI's annual editorial and design awards' postmark deadline is March 7 (next Tuesday). You should encourage your editors and art directors to enter--it's the only global awards program I know of available to b2b magazines published in English.
I was pleased to see that TABPI has Quark among their gold sponsors for the awards competition. I've had a long term hate-hate relationship with Quark, but have tolerated the software because my Mac-addicted art directors swore by the program. That is, until the last year or so, when I've seen a huge move to Adobe's InDesign.
In my view, Quark got fat, dumb and happy. And the folks at Adobe smartly realized that they could package their must-use programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat) with a DTP program (and hey, throw in a web design package to boot), and take the market from Quark with their Creative Suite. And because Adobe pioneered interoperability between all computer platforms with the pdf format, it's great to see that the Creative Suite runs as well on my PC as it does on a Mac--in fact, it probably runs better on my PC, with its dual core Pentium chip and twin graphics cards--but even Macs now feature dual core Intel chips (though Adobe's software won't run as fast on those until the code is re-written).
We're in the midst of upgrading one of our clients to the Creative Suite 2. Our printers like it--they prefer a high-res pdf from which to burn plates, and the Creative Suite accommodates smoothly. We're experimenting now with the GoLive web package, and the InDesign publish-to-web functions. It's a really cool package. (And we just completed a successful test of interoperability--proofing and final-editing a magazine designed on a Mac using Adobe's InCopy on a PC.)
But I am glad to see Quark sponsoring something important in the b2b field. Perhaps they've realized they've made a mistake in taking their customers for granted? Perhaps they'll upgrade and update the program? Perhaps they'll try to win back their dominating marketshare?
Whatever. Competition is good. And even Adobe needs some competition to remain on top of their game.
Note: As I was pulling the links for this post, I found that I couldn't access Quark's website--seems to be down. Typical.
Comments
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I was pleased to see that TABPI has Quark among their gold sponsors for the awards competition. I've had a long term hate-hate relationship with Quark, but have tolerated the software because my Mac-addicted art directors swore by the program. That is, until the last year or so, when I've seen a huge move to Adobe's InDesign.
In my view, Quark got fat, dumb and happy. And the folks at Adobe smartly realized that they could package their must-use programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat) with a DTP program (and hey, throw in a web design package to boot), and take the market from Quark with their Creative Suite. And because Adobe pioneered interoperability between all computer platforms with the pdf format, it's great to see that the Creative Suite runs as well on my PC as it does on a Mac--in fact, it probably runs better on my PC, with its dual core Pentium chip and twin graphics cards--but even Macs now feature dual core Intel chips (though Adobe's software won't run as fast on those until the code is re-written).
We're in the midst of upgrading one of our clients to the Creative Suite 2. Our printers like it--they prefer a high-res pdf from which to burn plates, and the Creative Suite accommodates smoothly. We're experimenting now with the GoLive web package, and the InDesign publish-to-web functions. It's a really cool package. (And we just completed a successful test of interoperability--proofing and final-editing a magazine designed on a Mac using Adobe's InCopy on a PC.)
But I am glad to see Quark sponsoring something important in the b2b field. Perhaps they've realized they've made a mistake in taking their customers for granted? Perhaps they'll upgrade and update the program? Perhaps they'll try to win back their dominating marketshare?
Whatever. Competition is good. And even Adobe needs some competition to remain on top of their game.
Note: As I was pulling the links for this post, I found that I couldn't access Quark's website--seems to be down. Typical.
