I don’t know when Quark began making it difficult (if not impossible) for schools to teach QuarkXPress. I do know that Quark fixed that problem a year or two ago, as they began providing QuarkXPress to schools for a very low price, and began providing packages of training materials to the teachers. Go, Quark!

Why does this matter to us, the experienced, advanced, longtime Quark users? Because we now have an entire generation of designers who are ignorant about what QuarkXPress can do, and are smug about their ignorance. I run into it every time I speak with designers about QuarkXPress. Existing users don’t know half of what it can do, and InDesign users have bizarre fantasies about what QuarkXPress CAN’T do.

I’m writing about it today because I experienced it last week at the HOW Design Conference in Austin, Texas, where I presented a three-hour session on “QuarkXPress Integration with Adobe’s Creative Suite.” The seamless integration is spectacular — just ask anyone who attended my session.

These people were hungry for information that would help them defend against the onslaught of young InDesign users. We talked about Quark-exclusive features such as adjusting pictures directly on the page, then exporting them for use on websites and in Flash animations. Sharing content in real time across multiple projects. Designing and exporting logos. The list goes on and on. (See my first post in this series for more.)

I’m also writing about it to encourage existing QuarkXPress users to expand their skills. If you don’t know what XPress can do, you have no argument against dropping it.

Quark has plenty of online resources that make it easy to discover what’s new in QuarkXPress. One of my favorites is their straightforward chart at www.8.quark.com/quarkupgrade/comparequark.html. It shows which features have been added over the years and also highlights the leading features from QuarkXPress 3 to QuarkXPress 8.

Quark’s website also has videos and white papers that explain various features, and you can even download their professional training material for free!

Other great resources include the training videos at Lynda.com and Total Training, and the free X-Ray Magazine.

And of course, there’s always THIS resource, www.PlanetQuark.com.

On the results page, click the “Similar images” text link beneath the image thumbnail and your results will be filtered to match content as closely as possible.

For even more fun, you can refine your results to a specific image size, type of content, or overall image color.

This is the book to give every new hire, every intern, and every Web-based designer you care for. And sneak a peek yourself — just to check your knowledge, of course.

$34.99 from Peachpit Press.

I understand that people often learn a program to do a particular project, and then don’t expand their knowledge beyond the needs of the stream of projects they’re called upon to produce. I get that. But I don’t think Quark’s previous upper management understood that — or maybe they just didn’t care.

From my experience with actual users, I would venture to say that new abilities added to QuarkXPress since version 4 are mostly unknown to the majority of QuarkXPress users. Imagine that! No wonder InDesign has been so successful — all they had to do was provide a better feature set than QuarkXPress 4.

And it’s tragic. The deeply powerful workflow-changing features added in the past seven years are brilliant. One person in my session exclaimed: “that would have saved me SO much time on my last project!” And he was reacting to a feature that was introduced in QuarkXPress 5, back in 2002.

Of course, this problem is not exclusive to Quark — it’s endemic to the software industry. If you learned InDesign CS to do your work, then upgraded to CS2, CS3 and CS4, it’s likely you’re not using many of the features added after you first learned the program. However, Adobe has been much better than Quark at trumpeting their new features to their existing users. And they also did something jaw-droppingly obvious: they flooded the education market with InDesign when Quark abandoned it. I’ll discuss that topic in my next post.

Meanwhile, I applaud Quark for their strong current support for education, which they massively improved a year or two ago. And I encourage Quark’s management to continue to invest in their marketing efforts, which are ten times better than in previous years. But Quark still faces the vital challenge of educating their existing users about new features.

Hey Quark! If your existing users don’t know what the program is capable of, how do you expect them to defend it against an onslaught of InDesign supporters? And if Quark users don’t know what the features are, then how do you expect InDesign users — who don’t even use QuarkXPress — to respect the program? Give your fans some ammunition against the entire generation of designers who were never exposed to QuarkXPress in school. The design community — and your legacy — deserves it.

Next time: Quark vs. the Department of Education.

The site was recently updated with Mac OS X 10.5-specific information, including best practices for working with Windows-based servers. Check it out at www.makemacwork.com.

If you’ve got a valid email address, you can request a free download of PhotoTools 2 Lite at www.ononesoftware.com/pt2lite.

I thoroughly enjoyed being thanked at the end by people who loved using QuarkXPress, who are now empowered with knowledge to reply to InDesign promoters. The two-way drag-and-drop support for Adobe documents in QuarkXPress 8 was a huge selling point, as was Quark’s unique ability to instantly export Web-ready layouts and complex Flash animations.

Here are some of the other “Oh, wow!” eye openers:

• Quark’s set of Bezier Pen tools
• Adjusting layers, channels and paths in native Photoshop documents
• Advanced control for hanging text, including punctuation
• Applying advanced Photoshop-level Picture Effects on pictures
• Sharing content between projects, with real-time updates
• Quark CopyDesk, a long-cherished tool for copy writers and editors who need to edit text and pictures, but who don’t need the full feature set of QuarkXPress
• Export any combination of page items to Web-ready and Flash-ready formats
• Dragging pictures onto the Desktop to export them

Overall, the thing that hit me hardest was the vast lack of awareness of what QuarkXPress could do. It’s understandable, I suppose. Most of us use QuarkXPress to produce the same kinds of projects, over and over. It’s a problem that Adobe will soon face with InDesign, and something I’ll try to help clarify in my next post.

He covers websites, blogs, magazines, newspapers, books and courses. Make sure to read the Comments section to find even more resources.

It was originally presented to the Seattle Graphic Artists Guild. Watch it here.

You can now value your assets by knowing which ones are used the most, and fine-tune metadata by knowing frequently used search terms. Cumulus 8 can also catalog assets via email, offering easy, network-secure uploads of photos taken with mobile devices, security cameras, etc. Performance is also up to 200 times faster than before.

Additional new features include:

• Enhanced collaboration through user commenting.
• Find files faster with user-defined filters that show only certain formats, approved files, etc.
• Compare multiple assets at once with new full-screen preview.
• Protect downloaded images with license-free watermarking, included in all editions.
• Create image variants from inside Cumulus 8, using the built-in Image Editor.

Canto offers a new entry-level edition, as well as its flagship product.