David Blatner: InDesign Feels Better To Use

This morning Adobe presented the first in a series of live eSeminars featuring world-reknowned InDesign expert David Blatner crowing about his favorite features of InDesign CS2.

David Blatner, host of InDesign esem­i­nar series.

In between demon­strat­ing sep­a­ra­tion pre­view, trans­paren­cy sup­port, and the info palette to the stand­ing room only Web and tele­phone atten­dees, David defined his frus­tra­tions and expe­ri­ences with QuarkXPress, which he used pro­fes­sion­al­ly since 1987. “Everytime I had to swtich back to QuarkXPress [when work­ing on a recent project] I would find myself get­ting tense and grind­ing my teeth.” InDesign is “a vis­cer­al experience.”

“I’m not a design­er,” he stressed. “When I can be more effi­cient in a tool, that’s when I real­ly get excit­ed.” He illus­trat­ed his joy over InDesign’s effi­cien­cy by drag­ging images into graph­ics frames, then plac­ing an image with­out pre-creating a frame–an impos­si­ble effi­cien­cy in QuarkXPress.

Focusing on intro­duc­ing InDesign to eSeminar atten­dees who are pro­duc­tive in QuarkXPress, David summed up InDesign’s supe­ri­or typog­ra­phy con­trols by advis­ing: “The more you care about good look­ing pages, good look­ing design, the more you’re going to like InDesign. If you’re mere­ly knock­ing out pages, you don’t real­ly care about the design, the typog­ra­phy, QuarkXPress might be for you.” QuarkXPress’s typog­ra­phy engine, he explained, has­n’t been updat­ed sine 1990.

In fact, sev­er­al fea­tures in QuarkXPress haven’t been updat­ed in over a decade despite numer­ous complaints.

Comparing via desk­top shar­ing InDesign CS2’s Lock object com­mand to the same com­mand in QuarkXPress 6.5, he proved that the lat­ter did very lit­tle. While lock­ing an object in InDesign pre­vents that object from moved, delet­ed, or altert­ed, the same is not true in XPress, which allowed David to move and delete a sup­pos­ed­ly locked object. David not­ed that has com­plained to Quark about the non-functioning Lock fea­ture every cou­ple of years since 1992, a time when he was known as the pre-eminent expert on QuarkXPress, and enjoyed greater access to the var­i­ous resources at Quark than any oth­er writer or analyst.

“I believe,” he explained. “That it’s so deep down in the code of QuarkXPress… I don’t think they have any­one at Quark to go in deep enough to even fig­ure out how fix the Lock fea­ture. If they can’t fix the lock fea­ture what else can’t they fix?”

Musing to him­self, David took the thought one step fur­ther and ques­tioned Quark’s abil­i­ty to pull off func­tion­al trans­paren­cy in ver­sion 7, due out ear­ly next year. Noting that even Adobe, who pio­neered much of what is con­sid­ered the stan­dard in dig­i­tal trans­paren­cy and blend­ing modes, took three ver­sions to ge it right with­in Illustrator; so then Quark expects to get it right in only one version?

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said in sum­ma­tion of the much vaunt­ed QuarkXPress 7.

At times, the desk­top shar­ing visu­al por­tion and dial-in tele­phone audio of the pre­sen­ta­tion failed to sync up, result­ing in the fast-talking David rac­ing past his onscreen demon­stra­tion by sev­er­al tools. Additional glitch­es with the WebEx desk­top shar­ing sys­tem and an unco­op­er­a­tive RTF sam­ple file bare­ly tripped up the ven­er­a­ble pre­sen­ter, who lec­tures not through eas­i­ly derailed plan­ning and prepa­ra­tion, but by sim­ply talk­ing away, excit­ed­ly shar­ing his enthu­si­asm for InDesign like a lit­tle boy with his birth­day present. One could hear a smile spread across his face as he opined: “InDesign feels bet­ter to use.”

Despite stat­ing in the mid­dle of the pre­sen­ta­tion that his agree­ment with Adobe allowed him to say anything–which he evi­denced with a com­plaint about a text wrap bug in InDesign–the pre­sen­ta­tion end­ed with David read­ing a canned state­ment from Adobe pro­mot­ing sales of Adobe Creative Suite 2. After plug­ging for Adobe, David pro­mot­ed his own projects, includ­ing InDesign Magazine, his book InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, and leaked details about a book he only yes­ter­day sent to press: Photoshop CS2 Breakthroughs.

The morn­ing’s “InDesign Advanced” esem­i­nar was fol­lowed up by “InDesign for QuarkXPress Users,” which delved deep­er into the spe­cif­ic sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between the appli­ca­tions, as well as how to open QuarkXPress files in InDesign.

Additional esem­i­nars with David Blatner, includ­ing a sec­ond ses­sion of “InDesign for QuarkXPress Users,” are sched­uled for Thursday, 3 November and Tuesday, 8 November. Complete dates and times are not­ed in the orig­i­nal press release.