How-To’s Day: Quark: Creating Print Styles in QuarkXPress 6

As both a creative professional for more than 15 years and as a professional creative trainer and workflow consultant of five years, I have learned many things, and come to believe in certain undeniable truths. One of the truths I have learned is that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and what I call “Repetitive Action Mind Injury” are both caused, among creative pros, by doing the same things over and over. This belief directly contributes to my professional philosophy, which I preach near and far, that automation is the creative professional’s savior.

More succinctly:  If you do something more than once, find a way to automate it.

When I can, balancing the production and creative techniques, the whiz-bang effects, and the plain ol’ highly useful tutorials presented through How To’s Day, I give you ways to automate redundant actions in your most used applications.

Unless you have made the leap completely into InDesign, QuarkXPress is one of your most used applications. And no area of Quark is more debilitatingly repetitive than the Print dialog. Every time you print something, you have to define your print options—choose the printer, select the PPD, set the color space, choose the paper size, set any scaling or tiling options, and on and on until your mind is numb.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the cause of Repetitive Action Mind Injury:  doing the same thing over and over. As a creative, your mind thrives on uniqueness, new and fresh challenges and stimuli; doing the same thing again and again can actually injure your creative mind.

Don’t do that to yourself. If you do something more often than once in a while—and who prints only once in a while?—automate the process. If you print to more than one output device—maybe a proof laser, a proof inkjet, and to PostScript or Distiller for final output—you really need to save yourself some time and Repetitive Action Mind Injury.

This quick tutorial from Iowa State University’s College of Design will make sure you only set the options in Quark’s print dialog once per printer and/or type of output.

Use it for yourself, and pass it around to your friends. Remember:  Friends don’t let friends repeat steps they can automate.

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TAGS:  design howto quark indesign adobe graphics  

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