QuarkXPress 7 Publicly Demoed at Seybold Chicago

Jurgen Kurz of Quark demoes new features at keynote address

Somewhat lost in the wel­ter of buzz about Quark’s new look was the news that Jurgen Kurz, Quark’s senior vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct devel­op­ment, led the first pub­lic demo of Quark’s the next ver­sion of it’s flag­ship prod­uct, the lay­out tool XPress ver­sion 7 at Seybold Chicago, in the keynote address “Transforming the Business of Creative Communications.”

The talk is said to have tout­ed such announced fea­tures as job jack­ets, opac­i­ty con­trols and a new ren­der­ing engine, as well as so-far lesser-accented fea­tures such as com­po­si­tion zones, which are meant to allow var­i­ous par­tic­i­pants in the cre­ative and edi­to­r­i­al process to work on the same Quark lay­out simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in dis­crete­ly defined and per­mit­ted areas (for instance, a design­er can be lay­ing out an ad in one area while an edi­tor can be edit­ing text con­tent in anoth­er). A new syn­chro­niza­tion palette is meant to make keep­ing con­tent cur­rent amongst the cre­ative and edi­to­r­i­al team sim­ple and quick.

A chief con­cern is user expe­ri­ence. Quoted by Publish​.com, Kurz said of XPress 7:

The enhanced graph­ics capa­bil­i­ties of QuarkXPress 7 make the design expe­ri­ence more sat­is­fy­ing than ever

Coverage of the demo is some­what scanty at this point, how­ev­er, Macworld UK men­tions it, and Publish​.com has a fair­ly exten­sive arti­cle on the demo, includ­ing par­tial screen­shots which give more of an idea–though tan­ta­liz­ing­ly incomplete–of what the face of XPress will look like.