HOW Sweet It Was! Thoughts from a design conference — part 2
As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m just back from the HOW Design Conference in Austin, Texas, where I presented a three-hour session on “QuarkXPress Integration with Adobe’s Creative Suite.” And I’m really mad at Quark’s marketing department. Not necessarily Quark’s CURRENT marketing department, but whoever limited their budget over the past seven years.
I understand that people often learn a program to do a particular project, and then don’t expand their knowledge beyond the needs of the stream of projects they’re called upon to produce. I get that. But I don’t think Quark’s previous upper management understood that — or maybe they just didn’t care.
From my experience with actual users, I would venture to say that new abilities added to QuarkXPress since version 4 are mostly unknown to the majority of QuarkXPress users. Imagine that! No wonder InDesign has been so successful — all they had to do was provide a better feature set than QuarkXPress 4.
And it’s tragic. The deeply powerful workflow-changing features added in the past seven years are brilliant. One person in my session exclaimed: “that would have saved me SO much time on my last project!” And he was reacting to a feature that was introduced in QuarkXPress 5, back in 2002.
Of course, this problem is not exclusive to Quark — it’s endemic to the software industry. If you learned InDesign CS to do your work, then upgraded to CS2, CS3 and CS4, it’s likely you’re not using many of the features added after you first learned the program. However, Adobe has been much better than Quark at trumpeting their new features to their existing users. And they also did something jaw-droppingly obvious: they flooded the education market with InDesign when Quark abandoned it. I’ll discuss that topic in my next post.
Meanwhile, I applaud Quark for their strong current support for education, which they massively improved a year or two ago. And I encourage Quark’s management to continue to invest in their marketing efforts, which are ten times better than in previous years. But Quark still faces the vital challenge of educating their existing users about new features.
Hey Quark! If your existing users don’t know what the program is capable of, how do you expect them to defend it against an onslaught of InDesign supporters? And if Quark users don’t know what the features are, then how do you expect InDesign users — who don’t even use QuarkXPress — to respect the program? Give your fans some ammunition against the entire generation of designers who were never exposed to QuarkXPress in school. The design community — and your legacy — deserves it.
Next time: Quark vs. the Department of Education.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
I hear you! i just ran into a similar problem, My local commercial printer, (who happens to be one of the biggest), emailed me the other day asking “did you do this project in Quark 8?”. I of course replied “yes”. To my sheer disbelief I was told, “can you save that back to Quark 7 as we won’t be upgrading, everone is using InDesign”.
I quickly pointed out the basic flaw in their statement, “everyone is NOT using InDesign, because I just sent you a project in Quark 8!”
I believe Quark should also supply free or heavily discounted upgrades to commercial printers, once the software is widely deemed stable and integrates into their workflow. Printers essentially use the software to produce the plates, not design for profit. And I think every registered design student should be given a free copy of Quark, even if it was one version old.
I’ve been in the industry for many years and have been fighting Quarks corner since version 3. I’ve swayed a few companies away from Pagemaker, Freehand, Ad Creator and lately Indesign usually based on cost implications of retraining whole studio’s. Althought the initial purchase of Indesign may be cheaper, the long-term cost of deployment and training usually puts the accounts department off from making decisions for the creative dept.
Also most students are tech savvy and will ultimatly get their hands on a ‘copy’ of something. So why not make the process easier and give it to them free… with training DVD’s and manuals. There’s a whole new slew of baby Quark users waiting to be nurtured. Granted they may not make the purchase themselves as most will end up working for companies but their voice will be heard in their prospective employers studios … “InDesign?”
I like what Quark has done the past few years to redeem itself with it’s customer base but it’s only a start, they need to be much more pro-active. I think they have lost touch with the common user, mac jockey. It’s all fair and well looking a case studies in leading creative studios, they need to go into the grass roots users.
p.s. I freelance in ad agencies throughout Northern Ireland and I’m afraid to report… some manaics are still using Freehand!!!!!!!!
Nuff said ;)