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Quark or Indesign

G.Kirby

G.Kirby

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 15, 2005
185
0
Swansea, South Wales
Hi Folks,

I work for a University situated in the UK and our 3 year contract with Quark is soon due for renewal. I have been asked to gather research in regards to which DTP application is being favored by industry.

I do not want this thread to be a bashing ground for either application, all I need is a bit of info regarding your deign company, such as:

• Quark or Indesign
• Approximate number of users (less that 10, more than 10 and so on)
• General location (London, Birmingham etc)

Thank you for your help in this matter.

G.Kirby

:)
 
InDesign has really gained ground.

Quark has really caught up.

Personally, I've been using InDesign for the past 5 years.

I'd give the edge to InDesign for budgetary reasons. It comes bundled in Adobe's Creative Suite. Purchasing Quark on top of Creative Suite would be an additional cost for a program with similar capability.
 
SwiftLives said:
I'd give the edge to InDesign for budgetary reasons. It comes bundled in Adobe's Creative Suite. Purchasing Quark on top of Creative Suite would be an additional cost for a program with similar capability.
Click to expand...

This is true ... most design studios are going to need Illustrator and Photoshop, regardless of whether they choose Quark or InDesign.

Illustrator + Photoshop + Quark works out a whole lot more expensive than a Creative Suite bundle ...

Cheers

Jim
 
In my experience, here in the north-east of the united states Indesign is far more heavily favored, and has been for the last 5 - 6 years.

My school phased out quark in all of our our computer labs, but have found that when required by a studio to use it, the students had no problem making the switch over to quark.

Back when we did have site-licenses for Quark I remember that they were a difficult company to work with. Our support staff was glad to be rid of them.

You should contact your adobe education representative. I know that they offer very attractive licencing options to my school which has several large macintosh-based design labs.
 
There are some heavy discounts on quark however like others have said InDesign is a lot more popular and It does come with the Creative suite. So unless there is a really big reason for getting Quark, I would say get the Creative suite.
 
lucidmedia said:
Back when we did have site-licenses for Quark I remember that they were a difficult company to work with. Our support staff was glad to be rid of them.
Click to expand...

I have not dealt with Quark's support in years. But from everything that I've read and heard lately, Quark no longer has the same level of contempt for their customers as they once did. Allegedly, they are actually quite pleasant to deal with now.
 
InDesign. Its shares similarities with other Adobe applications (PS, AI) that make the whole shebang more uniform and the workflow more consistent.

Keep in mind though I don't use it that much..
 
I have just been through the same dilemma myself. I was considering dropping Quark and moving over to ID. I decided to spend a couple of weeks testing QXP8 against ID4 and have actually decided to stick with Quark. This was based on a couple of reasons :

1. Our artwork archive consists of over 5 years worth of Quark files that we often have to re-format etc.

2. As much as I like ID and some of it's features Quark is still much quicker for producing and editing artwork. The is most noticeable in version 8 with a sleeker, streamlined interface. For me ID still has too many tools/panels/palettes etc.

Saying all that if I was setting up a studio from scratch I would probably just go with CS4 with InDesign. I think it's down to the individual users needs.
 
I echo what others have said. Even though much of my early Mac graphics career was with Quark, when I set up my own freelancing business I consciously chose Create Suite - I needed Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat anyway so it was a no-brainer. Not having Quark never caused me any problems.
If you were a graphics bureaux, or repro house then you have to accommodate all artwork formats that are provided to you, as a creative you can choose pretty much what you like.
The big advantage of Quark 'back in the day' was that it wasn't as resource-hungry as some other apps. It could run quite happily on very low spec machines. I don't know whether this is still the case.

Anyway, to specifically answer your questions:

1. InDesign
2. 2 users
3. Chester, North West England.
 
Indesign, is by far the better choice for many, unless you have a ton of legacy Quark docs.
Indesign will open them, but the type usually needs to re-flowed.
All Adobe makes for a simpler workflow. IMO
 
It all comes down to a few things..

#1 Personal Preference, what did you learn on? What are you most comfortable with? Do you use mostly Adobe for editing/design?

#2 Are you freelance? Do you work for someone? Are you seeking employment with a design firm?

Some companies have format standards which makes knowing BOTH applications key. Some corporations or firms use quark, some use ID. It all boils down to standards and application.

Personally I use ID, but knowing Quark and ID makes you a much more versatile designer. Especially if you're seeking employment, as your employer may use one or the other.

As to the question as which one is better? They both have their Pro's and Con's. But none are really significant, so again..For most, it boils down to preference
 
Hi All,

Thanks for the feed back offered so far. We have been teaching Quark for many years and in its various incarnations. As we are nearing the end of our contract should we start to teach Indesign instead?

If you are an employer which is your preference? or do you not mind as long as the student has the ability to design?

Once again, I thank you all for your feed back.

G.Kirby
:)
 
Northeast US - we run Quark. But since we do have Indesign, we use it sometimes if we get bored. :) Not really a fan.

Can you not teach both? Like teach all the concepts in one program and then point out how the other program does things a bit differently later? Frankly if I was jobless right now I would want to make sure I knew both.
 
Quark is still very, very widely used – the firm I work for uses it (we're talking about 14-odd users, I'd say), as did the previous company I worked for. I know these studios aren't alone in this regard, in particular larger ones where the cost of converting a large number of machines over (as well as training staff and the likely dip in productivity levels as they master the new software) is a concern.

G.Kirby – my gut reaction would be to stick with Quark, at least for the time being seeing as it is still so prevalent. You mention that your previous Quark contract lasted three years – would the potential new deal be for the same period of time? If so, then I'd suggest maybe sticking with Quark on this occasion and then seeing how the Quark-InDesign balance shifts over the next few years.

Also, could you maybe contact some local agencies and ask them their thoughts on the subject? Finding out what applications they look for on CVs might help influence your decision, and you can even see if they have any plans to make the switch themselves.
 
If you can use one, you can easily and quickly learn to use the other.

I grew up learning Quark and the place where I work has always used Quark. But I'd say the industry is now 40/60 Q/iD.

You could try to use the InDesign situation to negotiate on price with Quark.

Quark 8 is very nice and quite an improvement on 7. I like using something different other than PS and Illustrator. Using nothing but Adobe apps makes me feel like an Adobe slave!

Personally I use ID, but knowing Quark and ID makes you a much more versatile designer. Especially if you're seeking employment, as your employer may use one or the other.
Click to expand...

I agree with this.

InDesign.
Click to expand...

And posts like this help nobody :(
 
bobbydaz said:
2. As much as I like ID and some of it's features Quark is still much quicker for producing and editing artwork. The is most noticeable in version 8 with a sleeker, streamlined interface. For me ID still has too many tools/panels/palettes etc.

Saying all that if I was setting up a studio from scratch I would probably just go with CS4 with InDesign. I think it's down to the individual users needs.
Click to expand...



I was going to say exactly the same. Personally I find Quark SO much faster than InDesign but a lot of that is to do with the years i've used Quark, I know it very well.
Having said that, any one new to the industry I always recommend getting to grips with InDesign.

From a budget perspective it also works out much cheaper as others have said above. i don't know the exact figure but you'll be paying out an extra £600(?) for each new license whereas ID is bundled with CS.

From the point of view of which is the better product i'd also go with ID. Quark have got so much better recently – but only because they had to, as far as i'm concerned they are still playing catch up with the feature set. (yes there are some things quark has that ID doesn't but there aren't many!)
 
Used both side by side. Quark when using the "Claw" keyboard shortcuts for text placement was handy, but overall and by far InDesign has much more capabilities. We had Quark 4, then 6, then 7, and Q6 was absolutely the most unstable program I have had the displeasure to use.

Our operation, a weekly newspaper, was all Quark. I self taught InDesign and had everybody going over to it in 2 months. Whole paper ad production was In-Design, had to keep Quark for pagination as the reader ads were in a format exclusive to Quark. So we put up with the crashes on assembly day.
 
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