Quark Express 8: A New Way to Design

After years of quietude, Quark launched the latest edition of its design software, Quark Express 8. The software features a sleek new interface, typographical control elements, Web and Flash tools, and much more.

As someone with a publication-design background, I'm skeptical as to how Quark Express 8 would offer more than the Adobe Suite. One feature that might help: You won't have to switch from several different tools to make designs, like you must in Adobe. This is done through the picture content tool, which allows you to grab, rotate, and scale images in real-time, and an item tool and a text content tool.





The program also incorporates the drag-anddrop feature, which designers tend to love; you can drag and drop photos as well as Flash and Illustrator documents. Quark Express 8 also has a built-in Flash (SWF) creation, conversion and export feature, so you can import and export Flash, Illustrator, Web and print documents in a matter of minutes, with no additional purchase required. You can even export other languages--this will be great for those users who have to translate their designs for distribution to multiple audiences.

There are some who have already enjoyed this product. One fan is David Carson, a famous designer and author of the top-selling graphic design book of all time, "The End of Print."

"In QuarkXPress 8 you can see Quark has really paid attention to how designers work," Carson says. "The new user interface is fluid and uncluttered, which is exactly the environment I like to design in. I love the new picture box features that enable mouse-driven manipulation of the images to scale, rotate and especially the live cropping previews. It means I no longer have to spend time switching tools or typing in numbers and the new drag and drop capabilities should make working between applications and my desktop even easier."

So it seems that Quark Express 8 does offer a lot to designers. The program essentially combines many of the effective elements of InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop into one place. But it may be difficult for designers who are already comfortable with the Abode Suite to switch to the new Quark program.