Upgrade strengthens strategic partnership between Quark and The Art Institutes
Press Release:
DENVER –(Quark, Inc)–June 6, 2006 –Quark Inc. announced today that The Art Institutes is upgrading 3,800 seats at its 32 school locations to QuarkXPress 7 in time for fall quarter 2006. By adopting QuarkXPress 7, The Art Institutes will remain in sync with industry standards in the graphic arts field by training students to use the innovative new upgrade of the leading design and publishing software application.
Students will be able to take advantage of the cutting-edge features in QuarkXPress 7 — such as Composition Zones — to bring new levels of collaboration to their group projects, allowing students to be more productive and efficient. In addition, the color-based transparency and drop shadows features will enable students to create stunning visuals, while enhanced output capabilities and native PDF support will allow students to produce their work quickly and efficiently — an important part of the learning process.
“With QuarkXPress 7 included in The Art Institutes curriculum, every major creative market will have a well-educated pool of students with up-to-date skills and knowledge about the new features of QuarkXPress,†said Rich Moore, vice president of academic technology for The Art Institutes. “Quark has extensive offerings in every major market of the graphic arts industry, and we are proud to educate our students on the groundbreaking new release of QuarkXPress and prepare them for success in graphic arts, design, and publishing careers.â€
“The graphic arts classes at The Art Institutes provide a rich balance of technical knowledge and creative development, a curriculum approach that Quark values highly,†said Richard Pasewark, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Quark. “Quark is committed to bringing the education community the tools its needs so that students can express their creativity and expand their design skills as an important part of their learning experience.â€
About Quark
Quark Inc. (www.quark.com) is an industry-leading software company providing design, production, and collaboration solutions that are transforming the business of creative communications. Quark has provided award-winning software for professional publishers since its flagship product, QuarkXPress, changed the course of traditional publishing. Founded in 1981, Denver-based Quark Inc. is privately held.
About The Art Institutes:
The Art Institutes (www.artinstitutes.edu), with 32 education institutions located throughout North America, provide an important source of design, media arts, fashion, and culinary arts professionals.
Does Art Institute also offer training in InDesign? If not, I don’t think I’d be enrolling there for my educational needs.
In today’s Real World, one should be proficient in both ID and Quark. What you CHOOSE to use, when you have a choice, is a different matter. But you should know both.
The Art institute also fails , atleast in regards to their san francisco branch, in teaching web standards in their web design courses – so it would be only fitting if they lag in the print production area as well. By lag, if as skyline questioned, they don’t teach both ends of the spectrum – I know a few Quark firms in this area, but no artist is die hard for it – it typically comes with a sly lament about the old days, and InDesign continues with peak interest. Regardless I am in agreement, whatever your choice, please give these students real world talent. As a CD, I am overly frustrated by retraining our current assistants, some who graduated from that college. Much to my complaints http://www.pulltoinflate.com/2006/03/16/the-failure-of-colleges-and-universities-in-web-design/
Now, I’ve never made it a secret that I have a lowly, humble GD degree from a community college. But what an education it was–we had kick-ass (if you’ll excuse the expression) instructors who really seemed to grok why designers designed and why they had to do it and even the most basic tool course made an attempt to explain how and why we used the tools we used.
The reason I mentioned this is that Brady’s comment made me think of an episode in one of the layout classes I had. One of my classmates had brought in a Quark file from a “Real Design School” student. We broke it open and were aghast at all the multiple hard-returns they used to space out paragraphs. What, we thought, didn’t they teach them about space before/space after.
Maybe it was uppity of us, but we all couldn’t help giggling. Here we were, technical school students, and we were looking at this file with all these pilcrows in it, thinking that since they were trained at The Art Institutes, they should have known better.
I was fortunate enough to be going to school just as the college’s program was transitiioning from Quark to InDesign. I have both CS2 and QuarkXPress 6.5 on my personal machine, and break QXP out occaisionally to just play with it. I plan on upgrading to QXP7 when I can, because I think it’s important to keep up. But I keep my eyes on the job ads locally, and when they do mention software, they seem to mention InD more and more and Quark less. And one has no trouble at all locally finding a bureau that accepts InD.
I’ve hired AI grads who were taught they could spec Pantone colors in a CMYK workflow, “and the printer would take care of that.” You would think “professionals” who teach at AI would know that there can be a huge color shift from spot Pantone to CMYK, and would instruct to start with CMYK builds instead of Pantone colors. If it were Devry “College” or some school that specializes in training diesel mechanics you could understand, but this is the “prestigious” Art Institute!
Skyline:
That would have been the quickest way to a failing grade in the courses I took that you could name.
I suppose they do work with indeisgn. I just googled a bit and found several PDF files for the students. If you check the creator in Acrobat it says ‘Adobe InDesign 4.x’ Seems to me the school uses InDesign for their own work. They just also teach a bit of Quark. For themselves they use InDesign. And go easy on the students… We all had to learn. Most students my company enlists (teach program with local university) don’t know shit and think they’re just brilliant. Takes about 5 min. flat to show them just what they know and esp. what they don’t know. But after the 3 or 6 months with us in the real word they can kick the teachers ass!
Actually, in my GD program, I learnt not only Quark and Indy but also Pagemaker. There was a term of Pagemaker tought out of one of those delightful “Against the Clock” books, overseen by a Print Tech instructor. It was a way to introduce us, to whom most DTP was MS Word, to real DTP. Opened my eyes in a major way.
I will also forever hate windowshade text frames, but that’s another program.
Since the GD dept at the college has moved toward being more Indy-centric and PM is ever-so-slowly riding off into retirement, Quark has moved down the totem-pole to the Intro-to-Layout rung. So students there still learn both, but not quite to the degree I ended up doing.
Looking back at the original press release and woz’s earlier comment, I also remember that press releases, of course, are geared to making the subject of press release look good (this is not here being cited as a “bad thing”), but I do note that whilst the PR says that Quark 7 was adopted at TAI, this is not quite the same thing as Quark saying TAI has gone exclusive with them. It is quite possible that they are teaching both systems.
It’s been pointed out here that, regardless of how one feels about each application, the wise make themselves biligual if they can at all.
I teach InDesign and Quark (also Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) at a technical college, and students prefer InDesign over Quark by a 9–1 ratio. I’m reluctantly upgrading to Quark 7 for our program, because Quark’s probably still going to have some market share, but am going to offer it as an elective and make InDesign the core requirement.
Regarding Art Institute, if in fact graduates aren’t able to correctly call out CMYK and Pantone colors in their files, that’s certainly unacceptable. But I have to say that when I came to teaching from industry 7 years ago, I thought teaching this stuff would be a piece of cake (it’s not rocket science, after all). But it’s a challenge to keep students engaged in the technical pieces (file formats, color spaces, etc.) which we know are so critical in the workplace. I guess my comment is that teaching this stuff is not as easy as it looks, and students are wowed by the “cool” design tools and invest less energy in learning the how-to’s. I’ve had many graduates come back and thank me for insisting they learn the “boring” technical aspects, because those were essential when they reached the workplace.
Nancy Dick
Adobe Certified Print Instructor
Lake Washington Technical College
Kirkland, WA
Nothing to add here other than I love this site!
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All above comments seem to miss the point. Quark 7 is not your grampa’s Quark. It has so many new technologies that are worthy of treatises themselves that it’s a great opportunity for students to learn new ways to work. Try teaching Collaboration Zones or Job Jackets or Color-based transparency and cast shadows or shadow orphans or Web Layout or Sychronized items in multiple Layouts in an InDesign class. Please realize folks, InDesign is not nearly as innovative as you make it out to be (it was last year) and it’s slow as a dog on MacTels…especially compared to Universal Binary Quark. The Institutes are the first of many schools to renew.
Well ofcourse its slow. On INTELS. But we work with G5’s only. There are no INTEL G6 (?) for sale. Quark’s done a great job IF Q. actually works well on INTEL’s. I understand they are yet to release the INTEL version? But I do understand Adobe’s point of view. They’ve got more then one program to port and no professionals that will trow out their G5 for an iMac or Mac Mini. Quark did beat Adobe to it, I’ll grant you that.
I’d really like to hear some reports from the trenches about how buggy Quark 7 is, and how the learning curve is. Not more “expert” reporting, but Real World experiences of average users.