Quark's "New Face" Is Live And On The Web

New Flash-based website makes the case for the new Quark Inc.

newquarkwebpage.jpg
The face of NewQuark​.com

Denver-based Quark, Inc. estab­lished a new web­site this week. Titled “The New Quark”, and locat­ed at http://​www​.newquark​.com, it has at its cen­ter­piece a SWF file that has play­ful car­toon graph­ics and char­ac­ters that cel­e­brate the new Quark – the com­pa­ny that lis­tens to its cus­tomers and responds to concerns.

A look around the site reveals that it sum­ma­rizes and shows off the cus­tomer ser­vice and pro­gram improve­ments Quark has made over the last year, and dis­plays them in what Quark feels is it’s best light. The accent of the site indeed is on how Quark feels it’s improved; with des­ti­na­tions lim­it­ed to “Hearing Your Voice” (sum­ma­riz­ing cor­po­rate and prod­uct improv­ments) and “Get the Habit” (a page with direct links to QuarkParticles sub­scrib­ing and direct down­load of two doc­u­ments – “Guide to Outputting QuarkXPress 6.5 files” and “Insider QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks Guide”). While there are no obvi­ous, direct links to the Quark, Inc web­site, there are embed­ded links to Quark down­loads (such as the PSD Import XTension) and Quark press releas­es. Also, the spelling of cer­tain words in the rotat­ing head­line on the front page (such as “revi­talised” and “pro­gramme”) sug­gest that while the appeal of the site may be uni­ver­sal, it may be been more intend­ed for the European mar­ket than the North American.

Despite the lack of any­thing tru­ly new or rev­e­la­to­ry, the site design works well and the fun nature of the graph­ics will get and hold atten­tion. It does serve the nec­es­sary func­tion of bring­ing Quark’s many answers to the widely-asked ques­tion “Why Quark?” into one place and, as such, is worth a look.

5 thoughts on “Quark's "New Face" Is Live And On The Web”

  1. Brady J. Frey

    Invalid HTML, no doc­type, poor cod­ing habits both javascript and html, using dep­re­cat­ed tags – goes to show that quark has always cared more about print design than webdesign:
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newquark.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline

    But, then again, so does this site:
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fquarkvsindesign.com%2Fnews%2Farchives%2F2005%2F11%2Fquarks-new-face-is-live-and-on-the-web%2F

    Not a stab, just mak­ing a point, I quite like read­ing here:). This is the dif­fer­ence between web design pro­fes­sion­als and ones who are not – all this infor­ma­tion is freely avail­able online to learn, there’s no excuse not to do it right anymore.

    Quark, being the large com­pa­ny they are, should have known better.

  3. Brady J. Frey

    Well then – maybe Quark does read http://​quarkvsin​de​sign​.com, because it was over 60 val­i­da­tion errors on that sin­gle page! 

    Looks like they swapped tech­niques. Earlier they were dump­ing their flash in via the typ­i­cal flash export method you find Macromedia prod­ucts using. Now, they’re using a cus­tomized FlashObject Javascript method to load that con­tent. They’ve also moved to HTML transitional.

    Look at their code. You can read more about the tech­nique if you wish to down­load the script and learn it here: http://​blog​.decon​cept​.com/​f​l​a​s​h​o​bject/

    The method is sup­posed to detect and replace con­tent with flash as need­ed – and fall­back on con­tent if you need – they’ve made a lit­tle mistake.

    In the event that flash is not avail­able to the user, all it will say now is:
    Replacement content
    Right in the mid­dle of the screen. It is rec­om­mend­ed to either sup­ply an alter­na­tive form of con­tent of the flash, or some­thing that explains more ful­ly what is hap­pen­ing. As I did here:
    http://​russ​jang​.com/

    They still have some sil­ly cod­ing prac­tices. bgcol­or in the body tag is unneed­ed, if they new bet­ter, they’d put it in their styles as required. Same for align cen­ter on their div, and mix match of upper­case and low­er­case tags.

    I com­mend them for val­i­dat­ing their work, but these, again, are sim­ple errors that a web pro­fes­sion­al would know better.

  4. NM

    I agree, they should have done that. And their cod­ing is a lit­tle off. 

    Side note: I think your .SWF file has some errors in it. It does­n’t seem to load cor­rect­ly in Safari., and not all of the but­tons work. May want to look into that.

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