Regarding Art Institute, if in fact graduates aren’t able to correctly call out CMYK and Pantone colors in their files, that’s certainly unacceptable. But I have to say that when I came to teaching from industry 7 years ago, I thought teaching this stuff would be a piece of cake (it’s not rocket science, after all). But it’s a challenge to keep students engaged in the technical pieces (file formats, color spaces, etc.) which we know are so critical in the workplace. I guess my comment is that teaching this stuff is not as easy as it looks, and students are wowed by the “cool” design tools and invest less energy in learning the how-to’s. I’ve had many graduates come back and thank me for insisting they learn the “boring” technical aspects, because those were essential when they reached the workplace.

Nancy Dick
Adobe Certified Print Instructor
Lake Washington Technical College
Kirkland, WA

I will also forever hate windowshade text frames, but that’s another program.

Since the GD dept at the college has moved toward being more Indy-centric and PM is ever-so-slowly riding off into retirement, Quark has moved down the totem-pole to the Intro-to-Layout rung. So students there still learn both, but not quite to the degree I ended up doing.

Looking back at the original press release and woz’s earlier comment, I also remember that press releases, of course, are geared to making the subject of press release look good (this is not here being cited as a “bad thing”), but I do note that whilst the PR says that Quark 7 was adopted at TAI, this is not quite the same thing as Quark saying TAI has gone exclusive with them. It is quite possible that they are teaching both systems.

It’s been pointed out here that, regardless of how one feels about each application, the wise make themselves biligual if they can at all.

I’ve hired AI grads who were taught they could spec Pantone colors in a CMYK workflow, “and the printer would take care of that.”

That would have been the quickest way to a failing grade in the courses I took that you could name.

The reason I mentioned this is that Brady’s comment made me think of an episode in one of the layout classes I had. One of my classmates had brought in a Quark file from a “Real Design School” student. We broke it open and were aghast at all the multiple hard-returns they used to space out paragraphs. What, we thought, didn’t they teach them about space before/space after.

Maybe it was uppity of us, but we all couldn’t help giggling. Here we were, technical school students, and we were looking at this file with all these pilcrows in it, thinking that since they were trained at The Art Institutes, they should have known better.

I was fortunate enough to be going to school just as the college’s program was transitiioning from Quark to InDesign. I have both CS2 and QuarkXPress 6.5 on my personal machine, and break QXP out occaisionally to just play with it. I plan on upgrading to QXP7 when I can, because I think it’s important to keep up. But I keep my eyes on the job ads locally, and when they do mention software, they seem to mention InD more and more and Quark less. And one has no trouble at all locally finding a bureau that accepts InD.

In today’s Real World, one should be proficient in both ID and Quark. What you CHOOSE to use, when you have a choice, is a different matter. But you should know both.