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Should You Use Quark or PhotoShop for Your Large Format Design?

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 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 information see the Linknet Trade Show Library or go to the design section at Beautiful Banners Canada.

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