Adobe In Design Vs. Quark Xpress

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2003

Byline: Hal Hinderliter

IF YOU HEAR LOUD VOICES COMING FROM THE ART AND PRODUCTION DEPARTMENTS - NOISES THAT SOUND LIKE THE CROWD AT A PRIZEFIGHT - DON'T BE ALARMED. IT'S PROBABLY JUST A FRIENDLY DEBATE AMONG COLLEAGUES ABOUT QUARK VS. INDESIGN. SURE, IT'S ONLY ABOUT SOFTWARE. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE TOOLS USED TO DESIGN, LAY OUT, AND PRODUCE MAGAZINES, PASSIONS RUN HIGH. ARTISTS WANT THE LATEST AND GREATEST FEATURES TO THROW IN COOL EFFECTS AND EYE-POPPING TYPOGRAPHY. PRODUCTION MANAGERS WANT STABILITY, RELIABILITY, AND EFFICIENCY. PUBLISHERS NEED BOTH. WHICH IS WHY THIS IS A TECHNO-SPAT WORTH WATCHING.

A brief history of the battle: Adobe's PageMaker helped create the desktop publishing revolution during the 1980s, but Colorado upstart QuarkXPress jumped ahead by the early 1990s and built a lead in professional publishing by including features such as superior color printing. Adobe let PageMaker wither while devoting its attention to PhotoShop and the emerging Acrobat juggernaut. Within a few years, XPress had become the industry standard for magazine design and layout. Everybody - from mom-and-pop publishers to Time Inc. - had invested huge amounts of money and human capital in QuarkXpress, Quark Publishing System, and Quark Copy Desk, which enable publishers to create copy, manage revisions, and track production schedules with relative ease.

But by the late 1990s, Quark had also become notorious for glacially slow new-product development, bug-ridden releases, and less-than-exemplary customer support. Smelling blood in the water, the sharks of San Jose closed in. But when Adobe's "Quark Killer" arrived in the summer of 2000, the threat was easily dismissed. InDesign 1.0 suffered from slow performance and was prone to sudden crashes. Even productivity-improving features such as unlimited undos and better built-in PDF creation failed to excite the masses. Moreover, the long-awaited QuarkXPress 5 debuted only weeks after.

By the time InDesign's significantly improved version 2.0 was released in January 2002, however, Quark was looking more vulnerable. Many Quark customers had passed on XPress 5, citing a dearth of new publishing-oriented features and the program's inability to utilize Apple's powerful new OS X operating system. In contrast, InDesign 2 was built to run on OS X. It had better performance and stability, a slew of typographic and design enhancements, as well as tight integration with Adobe's ubiquitous art tools, PhotoShop and Illustrator. The reviews were favorable and the buzz on the street was undeniable: InDesign had become a serious challenger to the page layout throne.

The next round began last June with the release of XPress 6, which is designed for OS X. Just three months later, in September, Adobe struck back with its release of InDesign CS, which is part of an ambitious new package called Creative Suite. The package offers an updated InDesign with new versions of PhotoShop, Illustrator, and GoLive (a Web-authoring package), all of which can be had for about the per-seat price of Xpress.

A knockout blow? Hardly. There's no question that Adobe has produced a very powerful technical solution, winning InDesign many fans in the design community (see related story, p. 67.). Several influential ad agencies have embraced it, including Capps Digital and Deutsch Advertising. Chris Roderick, studio services manager for the Los Angeles office of Deutsch, who is a vocal advocate, claims that InDesign saves "lets us perform drop shadow, feathering and layer blending without Photo Shop, saving tons of time compared to our old Quark workflow."

But taking out the reigning champ in the magazine market requires more than winning the features war. Quark retains a 90 percent-plus market share, according to Merrill Lynch estimates. With more than 4 million copies sold worldwide, the pool of knowledgeable designers and production specialists runs deep. And there are hundreds of compatible plug-ins (Xtensions) to provide the bells and whistles that the manufacturer doesn't. All this is supported by a worldwide network of software integrators who customize, install, and maintain Quark systems.

Moreover, with add-on programs such as Quark Publishing System (QPS), which manages the workflow of pages through the design and production system, and Quark Copy Desk, which does the same thing for editorial workflow, Quark has become the nervous system of many magazines. Denise Witt, digital asset manager for catalog publisher, The Think Tank, in Austin, has recently added QPS and says she now has little interest in InDesign's claimed advantages. "We've seen a tremendous gain in our productivity and efficiency," she says. "This system allows our different teams to work simultaneously. Before we had to wait for one team to finish before the next could start."

QPS has become a staple for magazine publishing. According to Quark, QPS Classic has been installed on 50,000 computers at 900 sites, making it one of the most successful publishing systems on the market.