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Seeing the future?
February 18, 2008

Over the weekend I read many of the columns I have written over the years for various graphic arts publications. I was a contributor to Pre– magazine for several years, and then for CreativePro.com, and for various trade association publications. Many of those articles were technical in nature, and those remain valid. Others tried to predict the future, and on some of those I was wildly incorrect.

I wrote a piece called The Phantom Menace, which spoke kindly about a beta of a new product from Adobe code-named K2. That product became InDesign, today a powerful force in publishing. In the end I said it was nice, but I also said it would never take much market share from Quark’s publishing product.

At the time I wrote the Phantom Menace article, I couldn’t have imagined that I would switch to InDesign. I was a die-hard QuarkXPress user, a capable and highly-productive publisher on that software product, and it seemed impossible that I would or could make the change. But, I have been using InDesign now for several years and I now find QuarkXPress clunky and strangely odd. I know that tens of thousands of graphic arts pros still use it, but I can’t use it now without wishing I were back in my new favorite.

I remember when Aldus got arrogant (I think it was 1992) and life became hellish for professional users. I also remember when when Quark, under the direction of Tim Gill, put its better user experience on the market. I was so angry at Aldus that the change-of-allegiance was easy. Quark offered a pleasant alternative to PageMaker, and eventually took over 90 percent of PageMaker’s market share. But the tides turn, and Quark, under the direction of Fred Ibrahimi, became arrogant and began to ignore their professional users. I replaced a workstation one day, the fate of a failed logic board. Installing most of the software took about an hour. Reinstalling QuarkXPress on that machine took eleven more hours, with calls and e-mails to Denver (unanswered) and Calcutta (answered, thank goodness) necessary to get two 58-digit “authorization” codes. It was a horror.

One week later I switched to InDesign, and soon began to appreciate that program’s features. Since then, I have become very fond of InDesign (it still has a few irritating “features” that I would fix if I could) and I use it exclusively now. My analysis of its features – way back in 2000 – were spot-on. I acknowledged its support of color management, its superior PDF capabilities, and its excellent printing features. Today I find those same features more effective than ever. InDesign has changed from being a Phantom Menace to being the mainstream publishing product of our time.

I’ll check back in eight years and see how I feel about this blog.

Posted by Brian Lawler on February 18, 2008 | Comments (0)