This DVD from Lynda.com contains more than 8 hours of video-based training, and includes the exercise files used in the videos! This is the only training that covers every feature in QuarkXPress 8. The movies are short (from 3-7 minutes each), and demonstrate one task or feature.

Design Tools Monthly is a brief, jargon-free monthly newsletter for graphic design professionals. It has no advertisements and has been subscriber-supported since 1992. Our goal is to summarize all the career-enhancing stories of the month for graphic designers, print professionals, and other design-industry pros. Rather than reading dozens of websites and magazines, you get all the news, bug fixes, updates, tips and reviews — from just 12 pages!

Design Tools Monthly is available in printed form, as well as a downloadable PDF. It also includes a special monthly “Software Closet” where we collect the best free utilities, XTensions, plug-ins, brushes, and fonts for professional graphic designers.

You can download a free sample issue and take advantage of this limited-time offer at www.design-tools.com/qxp8_video_offer.

If your job involves determining or recommending the most efficient tools for creating Web pages, Flash animations, electronic books and printed documents, this report will give you the factual data that otherwise is buried in hype (from either Adobe or Quark). One of my favorite quotes from the summary is this:

“With InDesign CS5 we believe it has become clear that apart from designing simple moving objects and some video, more complete web and interactive design is not something that Adobe is expecting layout designers to do in InDesign.”

And this: “Graphic designers can work in a more efficient and therefore cost-effective way with QuarkXPress 8, because they can take on projects that would otherwise require training in Dreamweaver and Flash Professional if they were to use InDesign — or handing off a project to a developer much sooner, risking design inconsistencies and higher costs.”

Below is further information from their press release, and how to download the free report:

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The author tests and rates both products on their performance in creating 10 specific types of Web and interactive project that a print designer might want or need to undertake, such as portfolio or product microsites, banner ads, presentations and digital signage.

“We wanted to cut through the feature hype that software companies all too often propagate and look at what both products offered in practical terms to a graphic designer that works in print but wants to extend to Web and interactive design.” said Erik Vlietinck, author of the IT Enquirer Report. “The results somewhat surprised us. We expected with the enhanced Web and interactive functionality that has been added to InDesign CS5 that it would have either substantially closed the gap or even overtaken QuarkXPress 8 in these areas. While InDesign CS5 has certainly closed some of the feature gaps for interactive design, in reality QuarkXPress 8 came out on top in 9 of the 10 project types, matching InDesign CS5 in the other one.”

“QuarkXPress 8 has an edge when it comes to efficiently outputting content to multiple channels. It seems that Adobe considers InDesign CS5 an inferior tool compared to any Integrated Development Environment (IDE) hence the print designers are pushed out of the design process for Web and interactive very early on in the process. For anything more complex than exporting a digital magazine, users of InDesign CS5 are left in the cold and expected to either learn to code or hand-off the work to developers to do” continued Vlietinck.

“This is an area that is evolving very quickly.” said Vlietinck. “With Adobe’s well-publicised issues outputting from InDesign to the iPad and iPhone and Quark’s recent unveiling of Digital Publishing 2.0 to take their customers to digital devices and specifically their new partnerships around the Blio eReader, there will be a continued and rapid evolution in this area over the next 12 months. Desktop publishing is no longer just about print. It’s increasingly important to be able to design for and output to digital including the new generation of digital devices that lend themselves to design-rich layouts. With the right tools, print designers are very well placed to benefit from this revolution.”

The Executive Summary can be found at: www.it-enquirer.com/?p=1105
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The second is “Once Upon A Curve“,  a book written by educator Annie Bealey to encourage kids to write, and produced by Julie Pruitt, who is also a “QuarkXPress Magician”.

This morning, I was curious to see how much of my Mac’s processor was being used by the applications that I had launched earlier but were now idling in the background. Specifically, I wondered about QuarkXPress 8 and InDesign CS5. (Yes, I use both regularly.)

Upon waking my Mac from its overnight sleep, I launched Activity Monitor and saw this:

InDesign CS5 was using an average of 3.9% of my Mac’s processor.

QuarkXPress 8 was using an average of 1.2% of my Mac’s processor.

Neither application had any documents open. As I was working in other applications, I noticed that InDesign kicked up to 4.2%, while QuarkXPress remained at 1.2%.

Then I got curious about RAM, since whatever RAM being tied up by these applications would not be available to the active applications without the system swapping some RAM and/or hard drive space — another thing that slows down performance.

It turned out that the memory (RAM) being used by InDesign while idling was more than three times higher than QuarkXPress, at 140MB vs. 46MB — again, even though I wasn’t using either application and hadn’t for hours.

If you use both QuarkXPress and InDesign (any versions), you may want to have a look for yourself and post your results in the Comments section below. Just launch Activity Monitor and sort by “% CPU”. This could be interesting…

I found it fun to see a concise list of improvements added to versions 7 and 8. See it here.

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ContactPage allows you to quickly create image contact sheets or annotate all pictures in an existing document with descriptive labels. The easy-to-follow settings give you complete control to customize the look and contents of the final contact sheet.

ContactPage can build a document with all the necessary pages, import hundreds of images and place text captions in just seconds. You can specify margins, page size, grid rows and columns, picture fitting, box colors and sizes, auto save options, and more. And ContactPage comes with an interactive preview that takes away the guesswork by showing you exactly how the contact sheet looks as you change the settings.

ContactPage captions can be made to describe their corresponding images in complete detail. You can not only choose the picture name but several other picture attributes as well: full path, file size, format, color model, image resolution, creator application, date modified, dimensions, picture scale and page number.

What’s new in ContactPage 3.0

• QuarkXPress 8-native and Snow Leopard compatible
• Support for long file names and international characters
• Ability to specify character and paragraph style names
• Caption preview
• New pop-up for picture positioning
• Picture file icons
• Reorganized interface
• Optimized code for improved stability.

Free 30-day test drive
Download the free 30-day and fully functional ContactPage 3.0 today! After 30 days, you can purchase a license for $89, with discounts for multiple licenses. And, if you already own a previous version of ContactPage, you can upgrade at 50% off.

The book normally costs $54.99, but with this special offer it costs just $32.99.

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Join Quark for a FREE DesignCast
No Code Required: Creating Flash and Interactive Design with QuarkXPress 8
Date: July 7, 2010
Time: 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time / 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time
Duration: 1 hour
QuarkXPress® 8 allows designers to leverage their print layout and design skills to create Flash output without learning code–which is helping designers of every level take on new professional opportunities. Join Quark’s Dan Logan as he demonstrates a few of the practical applications for the Flash® output that can be created in QuarkXPress 8®, such as a presentation or slide show.
You’ll learn how to create:

• Looping content
• Rotating animations
• Image sequences that cycle through images continually

Register here.

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QuarkXPress makes it easy to add videos to your Web and Interactive projects combining the rich design capabilities of QuarkXPress.

Join this eSeminar to learn more about importing and handling videos within QuarkXPress 8 Interactive layouts. Use pre-designed video skins and control buttons to customize the look and feel of videos. Find out more about the different types of videos that can be imported into your Flash projects. Learn how to export the videos so that they play successfully on your computer, within a presentation or on a Web site.

Register now for the next eSeminar which takes place on July 20.

» 9am MDT session
» 12pm MDT session

Did you miss any of our Flash dedicated eSeminars? No problem!
» Watch the recordings now

We have made the demo files of our “Self-running Flash Presentations” session available for your to help you get started creating your own looping presentations.
» Download the demo files

For a quick look at how to use it, you can watch a two-minute how-to video below,

or check out our previous step-by-step story here.