I have had an interesting day… The one thing that I’ve learned from today is…
LEARN QUARK!
During my four years of college, I was unaware that Quark was still a program being widely used in the design community. I have spent most of my day trying to figure out what to do in a program that my educators thought was obsolete. I knew what I was trying to do with the design but couldn’t figure out what button to push or panel to have open.
Now some people might be reading this wondering what I was doing using Quark to begin with. Well I’ll tell you. The printing industry must be flexible in what programs it uses and unfortunately, the other two designers I work with only learned Quark and can’t and don’t use InDesign unless it’s a job provided to them. Today I took over a bi-monthly newsletter that was naturally built in Quark. The customer is a last minute type and so there is no time to rebuild the 8-pager before the customer needs a proof. I have desided that before the end of April I will be rebuilding it so that the next newsletter takes less time to make the changes.
So I guess the lesson is just that simple: Learn what you can and all that you can when you are still in the learning environment and not sitting at your desk with a paying customers job on your screen.
