With the advent of digital workflow, new responsibilities emerge for the newspaper publisher and the ad creator
Ask most newspaper sales executives, and they’ll tell you just how competitive the market place is these days — how tough of a sell it is when other media forms are drawing the interest of advertisers like never before.
Newspapers must be able to compete with these other vehicles, present compelling circulation numbers, and provide excellent customer service to the advertising client. They must be able to accept, position, produce and print the advertiser’s copy and images, with particular attention paid to reproduction quality.
Despite all the gains and benefits of computer-to-plate (CTP) imaging and digital design, the process of creating compelling packaging designs is actually more complicated than ever. In the days of film, it didn’t matter what creative application you may have been using — Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress, for example — because in the end the creative work became film, which any packaging manufacturer could accept.
Then came CTP, and film stepped aside and allowed digital workflow to take center stage. No longer was film trafficked; rather, digital files became the means for exchanging packaging content. And suddenly, it became increasingly important what design application a creative director may be using, and what types of digital file formats a package printer may (or may not) accept.
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.
I recently saw a video on the internet which featured a designer who had created an Adobe InDesign document that had somehow become corrupted. Eventually the file refused to open in InDesign.
Ordinarily an event like this would be disasterous to a layout artist, especially if the document were a huge commercial layout for a magazine or a book.
Since the file would not open he could not even revert to a saved copy. Instead of starting all over again the designer launched QuarkXPress (more)
Hello, my name is David Dilling from Markzware, thanks for joining us today. We are going to go over FlightCheck Professional, Markzware advanced preflight tool in comparison to Adobe built-in preflight within InDesign CS3 and CS2 I believe.
Over the years, we have seen more and more seemingly thinking that they are getting full-fledged preflight if they use Adobe InDesign built-in prefight tool within InDesign. Well, I am here to tell you that simply is not true.
Have any damaged InDesign files laying around? Markzware wants ‘em.
Markzware, developer of the Quark to InDesign conversion plug-in, Q2ID, is enjoying recent publicity for their role in helping a desperate designer recover a toasted InDesign layout, one so damaged that InDesign just couldn’t open it any longer.
