Content abounds at small to large organizations alike. The challenge for St. Louis businesses is to reproduce information in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.
Never before has the world of graphic arts been so dynamic, so ripe with change and new opportunities afforded by emerging creative technologies. And no longer are the creations made in popular desktop programs — like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word — bound to the traditional constraints of print. These days, businesses create content for any number of purposes.
The success of print projects today largely depends upon two things: the efficiency of the workflow and the quality of the content. Depending on where in the print manufacturing workflow you reside, you may receive digital content for any number of sources — some, more experienced in creating digital files for print than others.
In the digital workflow for print and multimedia, graphic artist must think beyond aesthetics and accept some of the responsibility that prepress suppliers once held.
If any of your design work in the past decade has been for print, you’ve undoubtedly borne witness to a revolution unfolding — the advent of digital content creation and computer-to-plate (CTP) print manufacturing. Film went away and was replaced by the exchange of digital files between designer and printer.
Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.
Not long ago, Markzware put out a cry for Adobe InDesign users to send in their bad, corrupted or otherwise not responding documents. We have seem a steady stream of crashing InDesign documents coming in, which is to assist our R&D team in making a recovery Plug-in, similar to MarkzTools. Keep sending them (to pr AT markzware DOT com), for we are making incredible progress. Those who want to see how we fix them currently, visit this site and lastly, here is a video up-date on the recovery process. We show a huge file getting fixed:
As a graphic designer, has this ever happened to you?
The scenario: You’ve sent your marketing masterpiece that you have meticulously designed to your printer. The deadline is tight, but you made it. Then the phone rings. Its your printer calling to let you know they are having problems printing your piece. You are about ready to scream because the client is waiting to get this piece out to his customers.
Below is a press release from IT Enquirer on a recent, detailed ROI (Return On Investment) report they did on Markzware’s Q2ID or QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion plugin. As you can see in this chart, a single license of Q2ID can have a first year ROI of over 1,000 %*! That is amazing. See exhibit from IT Enquirer report here:
* Make note: This report is using ONLY five files over a year period as an example and even with only so few, the ROI is over 1,000 percent- likely many publishers and advertising agencies will have many more than that, making the return on investment really incredible.
This is an excellent article from sf8h.net on how Leo Burnett (Frankfurt office in this case), one of the world’s more prestigious advertising agencies, uses Markzware’s Q2ID or QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion plugin. It says in part;
“3f8h.net equips 20 workstations at Leo Burnett GmbH in Frankfurt with Q2ID (Quark to InDesign) from Markzware.
Existing Quark documents are now being converted to InDesign on a daily basis.”
You can read the entire article, with comments from their Group manager Production design here:
If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.
