By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, December 25, 2006 - 8:36:00
Pros: 390

http://www.quark.com
Score:

Quark Interactive Designer is an extension to QuarkXPress 7, developed by the Quark engineers themselves. Quark Interactive Designer allows QuarkXPress users to create Flash animations, buttons, etc. without writing a single line of code. The XTension fits in Quark’s efforts to deliver functionality within QuarkXPress 7 for vertical markets.

With Quark Interactive Designer, the vertical market Quark wants to tackle, is the market of graphic designers with customers who ask for both printed matter and web presence. Graphic designers who are not into learning another scripting language can deliver professional-looking Flash documents themselves instead of having to hand off that part of the job to a third party.

The question is of course, whether Quark Interactive Designer is easy enough to create a Flash presentation without having to write code, and powerful enough to accommodate most of not all needs for interactive media. For this review of Quark’s most playful XTension, I will try to answer both these questions.

But first let’s take a look at what Quark Interactive Designer looks like. Installation of the plug-in is easy. You’ll have to fill in a lengthy registration code, but once installation has finished successfully, there’s nothing about QuarkXPress 7 that reveals something has happened below the surface to Flash-enable the application. Except perhaps the somewhat slower startup of the program.

Quark Interactive Designer can only be used when you choose the right document type when starting a new project. The type to be chosen is “Interactive”. As always, you will set your page size in the “New Project” dialogue. Only, with Quark Interactive Designer you will have to think twice before filling in a size. 

Is Quark Interactive Designer Efficient?

I learned that a Flash document that you create and which has only one element on it --such as a button, for example-- will output at the size of the page, not of the element. This is quite logical when you think about it, but not as obvious as it seems. The problem is that when you’re designing an element like a button, you concentrate on the element, not the page --especially so when you’ve ever worked with Flash. To QuarkXPress and Interactive Designer, however, the page is the Flash element, and so, to get your layout working the way you want it to, your page size must match the element size.

This problem is absent when designing a complete interface, an animation, or a presentation. In these cases, the page must be large enough to hold all the elements, and the association between element and page is no longer made in your mind. To be honest, I don’t know if this makes sense, but at first I got fooled into thinking that my button would be the correct size when it actually was the size of the whole page.

The button experience did teach me that Quark Interactive Designer does need you to think over what you want to achieve, and how it should look in the end. Some planning prior to starting work with the plug-in is no luxury. That said, the actual working with the XTension is child’s play. There are a number of conventions you will have to abide by, such as calling your scripts and objects names that don’t contain numbers or special characters, but all in all, the way you set up a Flash document is all clicking and selecting.

Quark Interactive Designer integrates fully with QuarkXPress 7. This means you will use features such as Composition Zones to their fullest effect. It also means that knowing QuarkXPress 7 is half the work.

The simple interface of Quark Interactive Designer takes care of the rest. The only difficult thing left is to know about the logic of Flash documents --if you lack such insight, working with Quark Interactive Designer is just as difficult as with Flash by itself. Luckily for anyone to whom Flash might as well be Chinese, Quark offers some good tutorials that will rapidly show you how the concept of building a presentation or interface, works.

The resulting Flash files cannot be discerned from “real” Flash documents, except perhaps in one area: the Quark Interactive Designer files are bigger than those exported by Flash. That was slightly disappointing, because as we all know, file size on the web, is one of the elements that can make or break a design. 

Another minor disappointment is that you end up with non-editable Flash files, so you can’t use Quark Interactive Designer as a starting point and then fine-tune in Flash. If this were possible, I for one believe that even intermediate Flash coders who also know QuarkXPress would love to use Quark Interactive Designer. It’s so simple to use, that I can’t imagine a professional not wanting to take advantage of time-saving simplicity combined with some fast tweaks afterwards.

Quark Interactive Designer does include the ability to build complex Flash scripts in its own environment but I think if you know how to write those complicated scripts, you’d rather write them in the “real” Flash environment, especially as the created files are smaller.

Perhaps Quark will work on that issue for a next upgrade.