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InDesign steals Seybold show as web ideas, gadgets emerge
BOSTON -- Dueling seminars on the future of print and the viability of the Web, combined with point-counterpoint product demonstrations (cleverly disguised as keynote speeches), made schizophrenia a healthy attribute at the Seybold Seminars held here March 1-4.
Craig Cline, vice president of Seybold Seminars, opened Monday's keynote with the comment that the pressing problems of print had been solved, only to be followed by people promoting the power of print (and, coincidentally, their products).
Seminars in one room touting the Web as the publishing medium of the future were followed by seminars in another talking about the inability of web products to turn a profit.
But on and off the floor, the Big Show was the official unveiling of InDesign, the new page layout program from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose. The application, unveiled to a standing-room-only audience at the keynote by Adobe co-chairmen John Warnock and Charles Geschke, is intended to be a core piece of Adobe's publishing strategy, bringing a common user interface and code base to the Adobe product lineup.
InDesign, the product formerly known as K2 (See The Cole Papers, March 1999), will not ship until this summer, but the beta version turned some heads with its ability to convert XPress documents with a quick drag and drop, multi-line hyphenation and justification, ligature support and optical character edge alignment.
Three longtime newspaper system vendors have been testing InDesign and two of them plan to incorporate it into their product lines. Sacramento-based System Integrators Inc. will be coming out with a new product based on Lotus Notes and InDesign, said Sverrir Jonsson, European development manager. Jonsson said he thought the company might have something in beta by NEXPO.
Don Oldham, chairman of Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah, said his company will replace its proprietary composition engine with InDesign, a change that likely will show up in the DT line late this year.
Jack Rosenzweig, editorial product manager for Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., is pleased by what he has seen so far. "They seem to be doing a good job of hitting all the things Quark (XPress) does wrong," Rosenzweig said.
When will Baseview incorporate it in its product line? "We don't see that we can walk away from Quark any time soon, if ever," Rosenzweig said. "We already have more projects than people, so we're here to get feedback. We like it, and are looking for comments from our customers."
Adobe and show attendees identified several things as being done right, including multi-language support (InDesign supports 20 languages), the ability to supplement or replace main components of the program and pricing considerably below XPress. (The list price will be around $699, although Adobe would offer "competitive upgrades from PageMaker and other products," Geschke said.)
"InDesign is a core set of capabilities," Geschke said during his keynote speech. "Everything else is a plug-in."
Keynote speeches at most seminars tend to be either broad-brush looks at the past, forecasts for the future or a mix of the two. The keynotes at Seybold, however, upheld the computer-industry tradition of multiple keynote speeches, most of which looked suspiciously like a cross between a product demo and a religious revival meeting.
In addition to officially taking the wraps off InDesign, the Warnock-Geschke keynote speech included announcements about a series of other products, including new releases of Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator, as well as two new products, GoLive for web design and Press Ready for high-end color proofing on low-end ink jet printers.
Quark's quotes
Tim Gill, chairman and founder of Denver-based Quark Inc., had his shot at a keynote the day after Warnock and Geschke. Like his competitors, Gill focused not on where the industry had been or where it was going, but on the strategic repositioning of his company to focus on five vertical markets.In a congenial speech, Gill said he was, of course, well aware of InDesign and the hype around it. He said he did not intend to let it faze him.
"InDesign is, well, InBeta," he said. "It is Version One of a product, and that means it's Version One of a product. That gives us time to respond."
The Quark-Adobe competition was good for them as well as the consumer, Gill said, but he expected to be able to hold the lead. "We are committed to keeping Quark XPress as the finest desktop page publishing tool, period," he said.
Bob Monzel, public relations manager for Quark, said the company would not say what it would do to counter InDesign's pricing, but did say Quark would track it closely.
Among the changes in XPress 5.0 that Gill said would help in the commitment to remain at the top would be improved import and export capabilities for Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files, as well as native support for tables. And every Quark product, he said, would include tools to help designers use the Internet.
"The issue with Internet is that it is costing too much money," Gill said. "We want to find a way to reduce your costs."
As part of that, Quark is creating groups to target specific market segments, much like Quark Publishing System (QPS) is targeted at newspaper and magazine publishers. Gill said these market segments would have engineering teams assigned to them to understand those segments and develop tools that would be useful for them.
"The products you see will contain tools that are ideal for you but useless to someone else," he said, a move that would help Quark maintain its position as the market leader. The company would continue to bolster QPS, he said, adding TCP/IP support and improved support for standard SQL databases.
Another product that should draw attention from the newspaper industry is Quark's new Digital Media System, or QuarkDMS, which is designed to help manage the various elements within XPress documents and their relationships with each other.
Lance Christopher Rohde, manager of publishing systems for CMP Media Inc. of Manhasset, N.Y., said the automation provided by QuarkDMS could help his company, which has dozens of technology-oriented magazines and web sites but is up for sale.
"CMP is for sale because we don't do this well," Rohde said. "It uses a very manual process, has large storage requirements, and there is a great deal of duplication of effort and materials between publications."
That duplication, Rohde said, ranges from photo archives to story and picture assignments, things that could be handled by fewer people if they could get a grip on it.
Each publication, for example, will send a reporter and photographer to a Microsoft press conference. "That's not very efficient, and Bill hasn't changed his hair in a decade anyway," Rohde said.
Such duplication carries over into the production environment with massive overlap not just between publications but within them, too. "We are looking at DMS for reduced storage needs and maintenance costs," Rohde said. "One publication's 48-gigabyte server is 90 percent full. We are looking to some pooled resources. We have 800 head shots of Bill Gates. We could easily cut that down some and save space."
Other markets Gill said he is targeting also could be of interest to publishers. One product, currently named Cypress, is designed for direct marketers. It pulls together information from disparate databases -- whether it be graphics, text, product availability or pricing -- to quickly generate catalogs and web pages.
Another, called Troika, is designed to allow users to go quickly to either print or the Web, pulling eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tags out of XPress and feeding that information to templates to provide customized content on the Web or for print.
"We're committed to print, we're committed to the Internet, and we're committed to making workflow better between the two," Gill said.
Print has staying power
Despite the opening statement by Seybold's Cline that the burning issues of print had been solved, the speakers immediately following him listed several strategic pieces of the print puzzle they were still working on, including managing the process from design to delivery, PDF workflows to link pre-press and press operations, and digital presses to allow companies to print closer to customers' sites.Holger Reichardt, director of marketing for Heidelberg of Dayton, Ohio, said that far from hindering growth in print products, the new electronic media had spurred it.
This surge in print has kept Heidelberg busy, he said, prompting the company to "produce a new line of newspaper print presses to take advantage of changes in printing needs driven by electronic media."
Those changing needs include tighter integration of pre-press and pressroom processes as well as new types of presses and networks of presses. Reichardt said these presses could work at printing shops that have linked together in networks or associations.
"We're looking at a digital imaging press, allowing a printer in say, New York, to print on an associated press anywhere in the world," Reichardt said. That ability to go to print anywhere was important for advertisers, he said, who had not been served well by electronic media.
"Electronic media is a positive driver for the printing industry," Reichardt said. "The Victoria's Secret web site got 1.5 million viewers in one night, but the home page was promoted by full-page ads. That home page has a 'request a catalog' button," which spurs more print, and "even Ziff-Davis (sponsors of the Seybold Seminars) uses print to promote its web site."
Advertisers on the Internet, he said, are not plagued just by low response rates. The same technologies that deliver the ads can be used by browsers to remove them, reducing the on-screen clutter presented to end users.
As an example, he pointed to a product called Web Washer, from the German company Siemens AG, which has U.S. offices in New York. Web Washer (http://www.siemens.de/servers/wwash/wwash_us.htm) promises to remove advertising on web pages, filter pop-up windows and bypass animated images, thereby loading pages faster and reducing network traffic.
"Try removing ads in print," Reichardt suggested.
Content is not king
Reproduction woes don't go away when moving to the Web, according to designers from the Wall Street Journal, Msnbc and the Interactive Bureau, and many of the lessons learned ages ago in print need to be relearned in the new electronic media."Content is the easiest part," said Jennifer Edson, creative director of the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition. "News breaks. News always breaks." The problem, as Edson saw it, was presenting that content quickly, in a readable format that readers could follow -- a process that newspapers got a grip on years ago in print.
John Sanford, formerly a designer with Msnbc and now with the Interactive Bureau of New York, said designers need to be brought in early on in the process.
"Believe it or not, it does need reinforcing," Sanford said. "The impetus for web products, whether news and information, or drugstore.com or something that is strictly marketing, that impetus comes from several places. It could be engineers that have a smart idea -- they have a new database and something to deliver. Or editors have something.
"The origins come from someplace else. They think they have figured this out. They have, but on the back end," he said. And that back end is not enough to attract and keep readers and revenue. To do that, you need a design, preferably a design that works.
"They need to think about the user experience," Sanford said, which means finding the information you want when you want it, without a lot of fumbling around.
Theo Fields, a designer with Interactive Bureau who worked on the Msnbc account, said the web site had met its goal from the start, although not without some pains.
"Msnbc is much more crafted than other sites on the Web," Fields said. "Things like the blue background to give it a much more TV-like look, or going to Sports and you get the sports show" were all things Msnbc designers strived for in their prototypes. And they went through prototypes, tweaking some things, scrapping others and adding still more until they had a design that worked.
Though there have been some changes, much of the site retains the original look, which Sanford attributes to having had designers in on the development process. But even that is not enough sometimes. Branding is everything on the Web, and the requirements imposed by co-branding agreements make life tough.
Competition for desktop space is enormous, Sanford said, and the co-branding requirements to get Cnbc and Wall Street Journal logos on the Msnbc business cover make the job even tougher. "On the 'Net, with the need for everything right up front, you run into branding issues," he said. "Deals are done on the business side, and designers are left with dealing with it."
Msnbc and other sites, Sanford said, were designed with the idea that high-speed Internet access would be along shortly and the sites could do some things as stopgap measures until that day arrived. One of those stopgap measures was using static logos for each sponsor instead of animation that could swap them in and out.
For most current web connections, those animations, if they showed at all, would be painfully slow, leaving some of the sponsors out in the cold.
"What we end up with, because of the deals that are done, everybody wants to have their name at the top of the site," Sanford said. "This means the framework can look like the fence at a minor league ballpark."
What you see really is what you get
The audience at Seybold remains Apple-oriented -- adherents cheered during the Adobe demo, er, keynote, when the Windows NT server crashed.The folks from Apple's base in Cupertino, Calif., kept their fans happy, unveiling a new release of ColorSync, Apple's color management software, and sprinkling its new OS X Server software, G3s and iMacs across the show floor.
ColorSync 2.6 is geared directly to the print world, taking advantage of AppleScript to allow repetitive tasks such as converting blocks of pictures or graphics automatically to fit the needs of different publications or products, supporting more file formats and allowing colors to be corrected on old -- or new -- photos.
It also uses press profiles, ensuring that monitors can be calibrated to a particular output device so that what you see on the monitor really is what you get.
Apple took advantage of the number of Mac adherents to host one of the first ColorSync users group meetings, explaining how to use the software in the real world, as well as showing examples of it in use, including dramatic examples of how it had helped rescue some pictures for the recent 25th anniversary issue of People magazine.
For those attendees who hung on to the bitter end, one of the last seminars of the week -- on workflow -- produced comments to remember.
Sitting in a room just off a showroom floor jammed with all the latest and greatest in publishing technology, Gary Poyssick, president of Gasp Engineering of Tampa, Fla., said that buying new equipment wasn't the way to improve a product, or to improve business.
"Purchasing iron ... we are good at purchasing iron," Poyssick said. "Companies have bought their way out of business by purchasing iron. Increasing your capacity only makes sense when you are busting at the seams."
-- Steven E. Brier
Adobe Systems Inc., (408) 536-6000;
Apple Computer Inc., (408) 996-1010;
Baseview Products Inc., (734) 662-5800, e-mail: marketing@baseview.com;
CMP Media Inc., (516) 562-5000;
Digital Technology International, (801) 226-2984, e-mail: info@dtint.com;
GASP Engineering, (800) 256-4282, e-mail: info@gaspnet.com;
Heidelberg, (937) 278-2651;
Interactive Bureau, (212) 292-1900;
Lotus Development Corp., (617) 577-8500;
MSNBC Interactive News, e-mail: webmaster@msnbc.com;
Quark Inc., (303) 894-8888, e-mail: quarktech@aol.com;
Siemens Corp., (512) 990-1000, e-mail: tom.varney@sc.siemens.com;
System Integrators Inc., (916) 929-9481, e-mail: sii@sii.com.From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.
