By: Erik Vlietinck
Sun, October 14, 2007 - 5:32:01

euro.quark.com/en/products/interactivedesigner/

Quark delivers Quark Interactive Designer as an add-on for QuarkXPress 7. Quark Interactive Designer was reviewed by IT Enquirer earlier. We then found Quark Interactive Designer to be a valuable addition if you want to make QuarkXPress 7 a complete vertical and horizontal publishing design solution. But due to its simplicity and ease-of-use, and because it is first and foremost aimed at layout designers who don’t want to code in Flash and Dreamweaver, it is also fairly limited in what it can do.

So, I wondered if it makes sense to designers to create Flash presentations, image sequences, or buttons using QuarkXPress 7. I can almost dream that it wouldn’t to German designers. German people in general --if one may generalise at all-- like to have things orderly, and not all running through each other. Quark Interactive Designer makes QuarkXPress 7 behave like something totally different than a layout application. But are such clichés true? A list of German web sites created with Quark Interactive Designer proved me wrong.

QuarkXPress 7 is great to create layout for printed publications. That’s where Quark started after all. Later on, Quark developed a then innovative technology that was ahead of its time, but never got implemented fully until it was incorporated into QuarkXPress. That technology became QuarkXPress Web Layout. Web layouts and print layouts are more or less close to each other. Even Adobe tried to make creating web layouts from within InDesign easier when it purchased Golive. InDesign and Golive were kind of integrated, but not really --I feel like it could have been if Adobe would have wanted it.

However, Adobe had to face Dreamweaver, a power house of web design which cast a big shadow over Golive even in the early days. Adobe didn’t think small. It always seems to think big, and so it acquired Macromedia and with it, Dreamweaver. Golive is now allowed to silently die. Adobe doesn’t need Golive anymore. Now that it has Dreamweaver, it can deliver web design and development for all levels of usage.

In theory, that is, because experience shows many people don’t want huge applications when all they want to do is create something relatively simple. iWeb, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver were built on that assumption.

Small, Simple Web Sites With a Bit of Flash

Quark never intended the Web Layout capabilities of QuarkXPress 7 to be all-encompassing, and nor does it have that intention with Interactive Designer. Instead, Quark wants to offer just the right dose of functionality across media to its customers. Typical users Quark aims at are layout designers who are asked to create a print publication layout, and a web layout to go with the print layout. With Quark Interactive Designer, a desktop publisher can now also accommodate a client’s question to create the print layout, a static and not too complicated web site, and additionally a Flash presentation or slideshow to spruce up the web design.

Layout artists rarely are keen on coding and scripting. And so, Interactive Designer shields designers from coding altogether. That’s clever, because making a Flash presentation with Interactive Designer is complicated enough as it is, without having to write one letter of code. The downside of the ease is that the resulting Flash file is a compiled file. No way you’re going to fine-tune any settings when the Flash result comes out at the end of the pipe.

Even when you decompile the Flash movie with a tool like Flash Decompiler Trillix, you won’t want to fine-tune the resulting files. The ActionScripts are like Chinese to non-Flash programmers, and you will end up with a lot of assets that you can’t easily tell what they are there for in the first place --at least, I couldn’t.

Because of all this, I doubted if there would be many people using Quark Interactive Designer to create their Flash movie with. I found it rather ironic that Quark, which emphasises collaboration between people instead of purely between applications (like Adobe) in QuarkXPress 7 with Sharing, Composition Zones, and Job Jackets, would give you --the print layout designer-- the tools to create something that has nothing to do with publishing for print.

And yet, after a bit of research, I could find web sites that were created using Interactive Designer. They looked good, but what is more important: their designers clearly said they wouldn’t have wanted to create those designs Dreamweaver or Flash. It would have cost them too much time and some of them wouldn’t even have known where to start.

That’s exactly what Quark developed Interactive Designer for in the first place, and also why they received the MacWorld UK award in 2007. I keep finding it a pity, though, that there isn’t anything between Adobe’s full-fledged Flash application (the original!), and Interactive Designer. I don’t think many people who are using it now would mind to have the source file next to the compiled result. That would enable intermediate Flash-capable designers to tweak their Flash files beyond what Quark delivers by default.

I bet there would be many more designers who would suddenly realise that you can do a lot more with QuarkXPress than just print layout design. But as Adobe doesn’t hand out the editable FLA format to its developers, but only the compiled SWF file format, should we criticise Quark at all?

If you want to see the Interactive Designer sites that I found, here’s a list:

• http://www.healyourself.de/flashpage.html
• http://www.kimporter.co.uk/;/li>
• http://www.eracom.ch/jcsiegrist/didactitiel.swf
• http://www.cieitsch.ch/home.htm
• http://www.f-stahl.de/
• http://www.frulana.com/
• http://www.parcequelecielestbleu.com/