Here's a simple fact that will make all the mac-happy creatives and artworkers out there reading this wince with disappointment; The workers of the business world love Microsoft. This statement is not based on the ever developing, cutting edge world of technology which appears to suggest that the war has been fought and Microsoft have lost already (Viva Google and Apple) but is based on the fact that people who work in business on the whole know (in it's loosest definition) how to use 3 tools for producing presentations; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This is obviously due in part to the fact that the average office system doesn't give access to anything else, whether due to limitations on the hardware or reluctance to invest in new software but if anything goes outside of this comfort zone the perception of the average office worker is that of a quivering, fearful mess. I want to make the case for something new, something better which the 49th back heartily; the interactive PDF, or iPDF as I have cleverly decided to name it.
We all used to use Quark Xpress to do our design and artworking, and we thought it was the best thing in the world - so fast, so easy to use, so standard. Those days have gone. Remember those jobs where you had to use a drop shadow which immediately meant an annoying voyage into Illustrator, probably a clipping path or two, loads of extra files that somebody else would lose or rename. Ugh. What about bringing in your PSDs or properly distilling those pesky PDFs (probably after realising that your exported PDFs were unusable if you were unlucky enough to use Quark 6). The annoyances stacked up over the years and so did the price and eventually the monolithic presence of the self-proclaimed industry standard became diminished in the stead of the young buck - InDesign. I first used InDesign when it was called InDesign 2.0 and I wasn't that blown away (probably stubbornly saying something like 'well, why do I need this when I have Quark already?") but with the introduction of The Creative Suite and it's common sense based usability with it's second-to-none range of features, there really was no looking back. I have used it in every studio I have worked in since 2003 and 49th Floor use it to this day and I imagine always will unless Quark makes a surprising return to form (I still have the Quark shortcuts memorised in the design-claw part of my brain) or if some creative techno-types release an all singing, all dancing open source version.
