I decided on this post after I saw a review from someone at Desktop Magazine put up one about Quark. It’s been a long time since I’ve touch Quark software for designing, as in… a very long time. Probably 10 years. I think the last time I used it solidly was about version 3.4 or something around there, and the last would have been version 4.1 that I touched.
I’d credit Quark to making me a more thoughful, ok maybe not thoughful. I can’t really think of it. Maybe… careful? technical? designer. I still don’t call myself a designer anymore. I dab in a bit of it from time to time as a hobby. But it’s no longer a full time profession.
I say careful/technical/thoughtful designer, because of how the software behaved. Quark was solid software back then but had so many bugs it made me aware and careful of what I did. If you imported a JPG file in 3.4.. the inevitable. BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! If you bought in an eps file with the wrong attributes and moved it in a picture box. Quark would magically disappear from your screen.
It also made me obsessive compulsive on using CTRL + S when working.
I remember when I was working at the local newspaper doing the desktop graphics, I had 3 hours before the paper was due to be printed and only just started what was a full page advert in colour. Stacks of photos that needed clipping paths, processing of colours, layout to be done, proofed by the client as well. An hour and half of doing it frantically. I pulled the last image in from file. It was a JPG and I hadn’t saved. I’d watched an hour and a half of solid fast paced work disappear quicker than a Bugatti Veyron can change gears, that’s less than the blink of an eye for the viewers playing at home, as in… I didn’t see my work disappear. It just went.
“F#%K!” I said, and started off on a new page to get the advert done. Luckily I knew where everything was to go in place after staring at it while I made the page. After making the page, the first thing I did was save it, thank god for Autosave files. But entirely useless unless you’ve actually saved it to start with.
I also remember having only 40gb of storage available on our server, I’ve got that hanging off my keyring now. Nearly all my planning was done with a pen and paper. The only time a computer was involved was to send an email or do some advert work.
Some of that may have not changed, but a lot may be done by computer now.
I also prefer a PC over a Mac any day when it comes to designing.
