Quark or Indesign a serious debate about the future

[supermacdesign]

Quark or Indesign a serious debate about the future. I was asked by the college I graduated from to participate in a board discussion about this matter. The debate is whether to keep teaching Quark and Indesign or the scrap Quark all together. They don't want to burden the student by having to purchase both and end up only using one in the workplace. They basically want to standardize.

Some of my questions for the fine folks in the forums:

Is InDesign better? Easier, is it making strides in the workplace and becoming the standard?

Is Quark developing a new version of there application and or are they going to fade away?

I personally have never touched Indesign but I only hear good things about it. I know that the adobe applications are seamless together and thats a huge plus. It also seems like Quark hasn't done anything innovative for years and are sloooow to change. Do they even want to? Any help or opinions on this matter would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[Blue Velvet]

Learn both. Why restrict yourself?

Quark still holds at least a 50-65% marketshare.

InDesign is nice, but fiddly. Quark is great for doing basic stuff and forces you to build your documents in RIP-friendly ways...

Quark will still be around in 5 years time... InDesign will have even more marketshare by then.

There's no rush to settle on one. I use both depending on the project.

 

[supremedesigner]

I chose InDesign over Quark

I prefer to use InDesign over Quark. Why? Because I can import just .AI and .PSD files to InDesign (with out using .TIF or .EPS), and I can't over Quark. 2nd, it's easier to use it. 3rd, Quark sucks. They should go out of business though.

 

[supermacdesign]

I need more opinions on this matter please. I got two and thank you gentlemen very much but you canceled each other out with opposing points of view.

I need to be convinced one way or the other.

Do the students need to purchase both apps or focus on the one that seems to be winning more market share all the time?

 

[Jaffa Cake]

Well, at the design studio where I work we're pretty firmly entrenched into Quark. We've spoken on many occasions about making the switch to InDesign, the main stumbling block (apart from buying all those lovely licences) has been time – the time required to retrain staff, and the fact that initially it would probably take us longer to complete jobs as we find our way around the new software. But it's a move we'd be very interested in making, especially as Quark can be a very frustrating piece of software when it wants to be, and as you rightly say InDesign integrates well with Photoshop and Illustrator, both of which we use a lot.

As Blue says, Quark still has legs in it – even if InDesign were to blow it out of the water and steal all its market share, there are still large numbers of design studios and printing companies who would continue to use it for a period of time. If your college is wanting to give its students as good a chance as possible of getting a decent job when they graduate (and it's not an easy task) then I would say they should continue to teach both packages for the time being. They could teach you every function of InDesign, but it would do you no good if every agency you applied for work at was 100% Quark based.

Just my twopenneth worth.

 

[Leareth]

depends on what you are doing.
for books and really long documents Quark is still better
for everything else Indesign is much better, connects to Illustrator and Photoshop easier. nicer interface. comes right in the creative suite package for one reasonable price rather than shelling out more money...
I started with Quark but now almost exclusively use InDesign...

 

[Ben Kei]

As much as I love Quark for quickly putting something together, InDesign does have that fluidity gained through total integration with Illustrator and Photoshop that just makes it so entirely usable and intuitive (as long as you're coming at it from a design point of view.. it handles a lot of it's core functions in a similar way to Illustrator).

Plus the ability to ditch Quark's totally fascistic customer 'care' more than hammers the final nail in Quarks coffin.

Having said that though, Quark is still very widely used and has the longer history so it carries a name with it that is hard to beat.

I work on a magazine and while we still use Quark primarily, we do have CS2 on all the art/production department machines.. hopefully InDesign will be making more of a dent soon.

 

[Orlando Furioso]

My school was teaching a little of both for a while but has recently nixed Quark in favor of Indesign. Students overwhelmingly requested it be taken out of the curriculum. Indesign's integration with the rest of the Adobe apps makes it a clear hit with people who have have to juggle every program on a daily basis.

 

[snickelfritz]

I use Indesign for everything, but I was trained in Pagemaker, so the transition was fairly painless.
I never really warmed up to Quark.

IMO, Quark is just a very old standard in DTP, and probably deservedly so.
It's difficult to teach old dogs(designers) new tricks.

 

[Macky-Mac]

teach both......the current trend may be in favor of indesign but quark is still very much in the picture. Teaching students only one of the programs would be a disservice in a couple of ways. Obviously there's the immediate disadvantage in job hunting if they know only one of the programs, but beyond that, it's better for students to learn to be flexible and not to be limited to thinking there's only one way to do things