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Should You Use Quark or PhotoShop for Your Large Format Design?
by Rick Hendershot
Trade Show Buzz
When you are creating large graphics for printing on trade show displays or
large vinyl banners for backdrops and display areas, is it better to assemble
your graphics in a page layout program like Quarkxpress, or should you do them
all as one image in Photoshop or some similar program? Here are a couple
important considerations...
Consideration #1 - Flexibility and Ease of Design
Those of us used to doing print advertising -- things like brochures, posters,
and magazine ads -- have traditionally assembled our projects in a page layout
program like Quark (or Indesign, PageMaker, and sometimes CorelDraw). This kind
of program makes it possible to prepare separate elements in Photoshop or
Illustrator or Coreldraw, and then import them into position in the page layout
program (Quark) and then integrate them with text of various sizes, faces and
alignments.
This approach is particularly useful when your document has lots of text -- like
a brochure for instance. The text handling capabilities of these page layout
programs are outstanding. They are much, much more powerful than a program like
Microsoft Word. You can take individual blocks of text and control their
properties independently of any other blocks of text on the page. Then you can
lay them on top of other layers, overprint the text on top of photos, or even
knock it out in red or white (or any other color you can think of).
For large display designs text handling is not as important as file size and the
ability to easily make adjustments to your final design. Often last minute
changes will require you to tweak your design. In many cases the file has
already been sent to the printing company. If a simple text change has to be
made they are quite capable of making it for you. They don't have to go back to
some previous verions of the file to move something around or change a phone
number. They just open the Quark file and make an adjustment to that particular
element.
This approach also minimizes the overall file size. For instance, if you want to
create a design like the one above -- "Orange Hair Girl" -- the overall file
size can be minimized by just sending a .jpg of the girl pic along with the
Quark file that contains the special text and the layout. On the other hand, if
you use Photoshop to create a .jpg of the whole layout and send that to your
printing house, the file will be at least three times larger.
And if you want to make any text or positioning changes to your image file, you
will have to dig out the last good version of the Photoshop file, make your
changes and then resave it as a final image file. Quark is clearly the winner in
such situations.
Consideration #2 - Special Effects
On the other hand, you may not be able to easily pull your design off with
Quark. For instance I have started using a lot of special text effects generated
right in Photoshop -- bevels, shadows, outlines -- Sometimes these effects are
very helpful when trying to make your text stand out against certain
backgrounds. Here's an example...
You just can't do these type effects in a program like Quark. If you want to
merge shadows and fades right into photographic backgrounds you pretty much have
to use layers and then merge them into a single image. In this case your best
bet is to send a high quality .jpg of the file, and keep the .psd file handy in
case you have to make any last minute changes. If you do, then make them at your
end, and send another .jpg.
For more articles see the
Linknet Trade Show Library.
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