[design] Debut: QuarkVsInDesign.com

Designer Pariah Burke has finally debuted a site whose aim is to keep the design community (and anyone else who has any sort of interest in the situation) abreast of the battle between the design industry's top applications for dominiance.

QuarkVSInDesign.com is a labor of some considerable effort. It is a testament to how much news is going on in the design world that this site actually began as a category on his personal website, IAmPariah.com. Famously, it has registered the number one and number two hits on Google for the search term "Quark Sucks".

All four of my regular readers may wonder what the fuss is about. Rightly so. What goes on in the design industry is not exactly a general interest topic. But the struggle between Quark, Inc, and Adobe Systems for king of the layout application hill is just as big, in its way, as the struggle between Ford and General Motors for control of the automobile market. Name any two big names in consumer goods that are waging an all-out war for the attention and dollars of the public at large, and the one between Adobe and Quark looms just as large in the high-priced world of design.

In one corner is Quark, which rested on its laurels as the winner of the Quark/PageMaker fight (which PM lost by resting on its laurels), who is playing catch up, offering in-program photo geeking with QuarkVista. In the other is Adobe, who stands for innovation, not dominating the field yet, but unrelenting in its improving InDesign. The CS version has turned heads in a major way, and more and more workflows are going over to it.

Will Quark stanch the flow of customers to Adobe? Will Adobe win? Will Quark, in its desperation to defend its position, actually wind up looking and acting like InDesign?

The answers are not yet. But the story, on QuarkVsInDesign.com, will be one to follow.