Three leading advertising and branding agencies announce their formal switch from QuarkXPress for page layout to InDesign CS.
Joining the who’s-who publishing, advertising, and branding roster that includes Bernstein-Rein Advertising, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, GSD&M, The Integer Group, Landor Associates, Publicis West, and Schadler Kramer Group, are big names Oglivy & Mather, DDB Worldwide, and Wunderman.
Ogilvy & Mather, a leading advertising agency with 312 offices in 89 countries, is standardizing on InDesign CS across its worldwide agency network as part of an all-Adobe Creative Suite workflow. InDesign’s ability to import native Photoshop and Illustrator files into InDesign layouts is more productive than flattening or using intermediary formats like TIFF or EPS, according to art directors at Ogilvy & Mather Los Angeles. The agency also sees other creative and production benefits in their new InDesign-based workflow.
“The ability to create blends and transparencies within InDesign contributes to significant time savings, while the software’s advanced typographical controls enables designers to create sophisticated type treatments to meet the needs of our clients,†said John Lopez, studio manager at Ogilvy & Mather. “The ease of creating software scripts for InDesign CS is enabling us to automate many repetitive processes such as preparing ads to meet specific publishers’ requirements.â€
After switching its worldwide operations to InDesign CS at the beginning of 2004, DDB Worldwide has seen the tight integration among components of Adobe Creative Suite streamline their workflow, allowing more time for experimentation in creating ads for clients such as Microsoft, Philips, and Safeco. And the decision was not solely from within DDB Worldwide. Many of the agency’s top clients mandated that their work be created and provided to print vendors in InDesign CS format.
Wunderman, whose integrated studio services group provides print production services for brand-name clients including Ford, Kraft, and Citibank, tells a similar tale.
“Our creative and production staffs took to InDesign CS immediately,†said Steve Gleason, director of integrated studio services, Wunderman Chicago. “We were producing all of our ads using InDesign CS and the other components of Adobe Creative Suite in less than one month. Since then, we have increased our productivity, creating more ads of even higher quality without adding staff.â€
“InDesign CS is helping the world’s top advertising agencies bring creative ideas to life in exciting and productive ways,†said Jim Heeger, senior vice president of Creative Professional products at Adobe. “Their incredible work inspires us to find new ways to improve design workflows and further enhance the role of design in the advertising community.â€
For more than a decade, since beating rival Aldus PageMaker in the early Nineties, Denver, Colorado-based Quark, Inc.‘s QuarkXPress was the standard in page layout and publishing applications. That standard was challenged by Adobe Systems, Inc. with the 1998 release of InDesign 1.0, though it was not until the release of InDesign CS, the third full version of the product in late 2003 that major agencies began to leave QuarkXPress behind. Since then a heated battle, dubbed Desktop Publishing War II, has raged between InDesign and QuarkXPress, and between their makers, Adobe Systems, Inc. and Quark, Inc., two companies whose bitter rivalry is more personal and more publicisized than the one between Apple Computers and Microsoft.
So titanic is the battle between Quark and InDesign that it has spawned thousands of magazine, newspapers, and website articles, several books to facilitate users’ switching from one to the other, and even a dedicated news source, the three year-old, self-described “war correspondant,” Quark VS InDesign.com.
There is ONE major feature between the two programs that even the most diehard Quark-fan cannot dispute.
The cost.
Quark XPress 6.5 as of this writing costs $1,019.00 in a major mail-order catalog. The ENTIRE Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive and Acrobat – FIVE programs) costs $1,140.00 in the same catalog.
If you still wanted to go with Quark XPress, to accomplish your work you’d still have to purchase Photoshop (or a competitor), Illustrator/FreeHand, and Acrobat Pro. Purchased separately, these costs can easily be $1,500. Of course, that means that if you wanted to run a productive prepress shop, printer, or design studio, you would still likely buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite in order to save on those three programs. Which means you would get InDesign “thrown in”. So why not use it?
And training costs? Hah. If you can use Illustrator you can use InDesign. If you are familiar with Quark you can make the switch easily enough. Any industry professional who needs 2 days of intensive training to learn the essentials of InDesign should be tested for drugs. Or given some.
Quark continues to offset their huge development costs of all of their failed software ventures by charging more and more for their ONE good product: Quark XPress. Don’t get me started on Quark XPress Passport Edition, which costs $1,895 and comes with a troublesome USB dongle. InDesign has all of its features and MORE at 1/3 the price.
There is no reason to use Quark XPress unless you are tied to a Quark Copydesk system at a major publisher. My $0.02
Thanks for the comments, Greg.
There are a few points I’d like to dispute, though:
Are those amounts in U.S. dollars? If so, don’t buy anything from that catalog. Quark 6.5 retails for US$945, and Creative Suite Premium for US$1,299.
Your point about the costs of the entire workflow are valid. Buying the entire Creative Suite Premium, with its five point products, is effectively the equivolant cost of any two of those products. This is the main benefit to the suite model of software sale. Just look what it did for the business application space in the early Nineties when Microsoft’s Office Suite trampled WordPerfect right out of business.
I have to disagree with you there. Granted, I make my living in part by training people to switch from Quark to InDesign, but, by virtue of that part of my career, I know that different people learn in different ways. I train people all over North America to use Quark, InDesign, Creative Suite, and many other products. Though InDesign is intuitive, it does take time to learn–especially when one is productive in Quark.
Tools and features behave differently. Where Quark puts the majority of its functions in dialog boxes, InDesign puts them on palettes that are organized differently than Quark. Terminology differences are another stumbling block–for example: If Quark is your bread and butter, the term “runaround” is plain English to you . Trying to find runaround settings in InDesign is often frustrating. Coming from knowing only Quark, many users don’t intuitively grasp that, not only is it on a palette instead of a dialog, but the function is called (the more logical) “text wrap”. Further, to get to the Text Wrap palette one must navigate a two-deep menu.
Some people–obviously you and I as well–pick it up easily. Others need expert guidance, especially from someone who understands their work, how they did it in Quark, and how they can do it just as productively, if not better, in InDesign.
Passport Edition no longer uses the dongle as an anti-piracy measure. They dropped that with version 6.
Agreed, InDesign has most of the features of Passport in the standard version.
Pingback: Quark VS InDesign » QuarkXPress 7: Quark’s Last, Best Hope