Do you want to produce well-designed and coordinated marketing materials, such as business cards, tri-fold brochures, promotional postcards, coupons, etc.? Quark (the man behind the respected professional desktop publishing program QuarkXpress) has a new free template design software/service combination called Quark Promotion.
Quark Promotion is a free software with attractive, customizable print templates for creating and ordering coordinated promotional materials, such as business cards, flyers, coupons, postcards, etc.
When you download Quark Promotion software, you will immediately go to the link to the matching template set. The current templates are divided into 17 industry categories, such as accounting, car repair, carpet cleaning, dentistry, spa, veterinary and general templates. Quark promises that by next year they will have thousands of templates in dozens of categories. The template you select and edit is saved locally on your computer.
Quark Promotion’s templates are very well designed and very customizable. You can easily replace the pictures with the provided free stock photos (often higher than average) or your own photos. You can also add your logo, replace placeholder text with your own copy (by typing or using copy/paste), move elements around, add or delete other elements, and choose different color schemes.
This does not mean that Quark Promotion has all the design features you might need. You cannot create your own color scheme (although Quark says they will add a color picker in the future). There are also no text wrapping options for shaping text around photos or logos. What’s even more annoying is that once we customize the tri-fold brochure by replacing photos, placing our logo, and adding our address, phone number, and website, these changes are not reflected in the other templates in the group-such as business cards and postcard. At the very least, our logo should be populated throughout the template. Quark said that they designed the software this way to give users flexibility, but in our opinion, it just creates extra work for users.
The whole purpose of Quark Promotion software is to create documents that can be sent to the printing house. In fact, this is how quarks make money-as a percentage of printing sales. Therefore, the only output you can get from your desktop device is a proof with a "test print" scribbled on it.
On the contrary, when you have completed your design, the final stage is to order your prints from one of the stores that have signed up for the Quark Promotion service (independent stores and large chain stores). You can choose to order by mail or find a nearby printer (by searching for your zip code) to pick up your documents. Depending on whether you order proof or not, your order should be ready in about one to three days. Quark said that at the time of writing, they have 35 printing houses, and they expect to have 125 by the end of this year and 1,500 by the end of next year. The franchisees currently contracted are: Allegra Networks, AlphaGraphics, PIP Printing, Signal Graphics and Sir Speedy.
One of the main advantages compared to competitors such as VistaPrint is that Quark Promotion controls the color management of your files and checks your files to ensure that all content has a high enough resolution to ensure better and more predictable printing results.
Quark Promotion is very new and currently not fully functional. However, as they add templates and more controls (such as customizable color schemes), we hope that it will live up to its tradition and provide tools that can be used to design and order high-quality print materials. They even promised us that they will study the ability to auto-fill the logo in the entire template set.