Weblog for reading internet design.

Earlier today, the good people from Quark came and gave a presentation, which turned out to be nothing more than a sales pitch in which attendance was manditory.

I’ll preface this next statement with this; I’ve had to sit through my fair share of business classes, enough to receive a mention on my degree from the University of North Texas, and also to know that I don’t like business and the way business people treat other living, breathing human beings. With that said, I felt insulted by the tone of the presentation.

A sales call is a very formalized process. I don’t feel it’s effective to the t-shirt and jeans crowd, to people that think for a living. There was a lot of down talking from a person that appeared to know just as much, or even less than I did about technology.

However, not everyone in the room was as up on technology as the rest of us. So, I do feel that there was a little lost in translation. For example, one of the new features in Quark is better transparency flattening.

I’ve always been “that guy,” the guy you come to with questions about technology. The biggest thing I see from other, reguarding desktop publishing, is a lack of understanding of the relationship between a 72 dpi composite on a screen, and a 300 dpi print out. The most common question is “Why do my pictures look all pixely?” The answer is usually because you are in a low composite screen mode, which helps the computer run faster. (The other is because you didn’t link the file correctly.)  Point being: what you see on a screen isn’t neccessarly how it will print.

So, when they talked about how Quark handles transparency, that actually is a pretty big thing. Transparency is an easy thing to fuck up in print.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 22 February 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.