by Kelly Kordes Anton

How embracing the holy trinity of templates, master pages, and style sheets will save you more time than all of the new features in QuarkXPress 7 combined.

According to Quark lore, the company once hired a freelance graphic designer to create a QuarkXPress newsletter. When Quark received the document, it wouldn’t print. A little troubleshooting uncovered the problem — and uncovered it, and uncovered it.

The document pages contained scores of draft items the designer created while brainstorming the design. Having never met the delete key, each time she changed her mind or didn’t like something, she simply drew a white box over it. On this poor man’s new page, she started again, creating and layering items, only to be covered by a white box again. This was in the mid-1980s, back when the print engine tried to send everything on the page to the printer (as opposed to everything visible on the page). This choked the printer faster than you can say command + K.

While this is an extreme example of poor document production, it illustrates the simple fact that there is an efficient way to create documents and there’s an inefficient way.

Even when you think it doesn't matter — a one-off ad, for example — it does. Ever work in an ad with a keyline around it, only the keyline is formed by a box placed, inexplicable, oon top of all the other items so you can’t actually touch anything without the finger contortions involved in clicking through items (command + option + shift or ctrl + alt + shift + click with the item tool, in case you’ve forgotten)?

While it’s somewhat forgivable to work on ads, business cards, stationery, and the like without going to the trouble of creating master pages and style sheets, you could still end up sorry when it comes time for revisions. When it comes to longer documents such as newsletters, magazines, and book chapters, poor document construction is downright unforgivable. That is why graphic designers either love or hate to work with me — because as a lowly copy editor (who happens to write publishing books) I can not only spot poor document construction, but I can’t help but tell them about it. The ones who love me give me the QuarkXPress files, let me fix it, and move forward with streamlined documents and a happy editor. The ones who hate me, the artistés, well, they suffer in silence while correcting the same spacing, formatting, and output errors over and over — and over, and over — and over and over.

Credit Where Due

Everything I learned about document production, I learned from the late Dan Murphy of Quark, Inc. A brilliant typographer who actually owned a letterpress, Dan could solve any document-production problem with combinations as simple as indents and item anchoring. His documents were idiot proof, with intuitively named paragraph and character style sheets for every occasion, streamlined master pages, ingenuous box-linking schemes, and much more. Dan died of complications from diabetes at the early age of 31 in 1999, but he lives on in skillfully created documents everywhere, but particularly at Quark.

For training on the new features of QuarkXPress 7,
Sterling Ledet offers classes all over the US.
Visit their site for class schedules.

I channeled Dan’s document-production skills when faced with a redesign of a magazine that I edit. The new design is stunning; the QuarkXPress layouts were not. I was stunned by the jumble of guides, boxes, colors, style sheets, master pages, and more that made up the layouts. From the templates, there was no way to tell the old from the new, the intentional design touches from the accidental placements, what was right, and what was wrong. The templates needed not layout or design help, but mundane document-production assistance to be useful. It took some time, experimentation, and research, but I overhauled the templates. The result, I believe, would make Dan proud.

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