Workshop of ‘Quark Express’

A three-day workshop of 'Quark Xpress' was oragnised by The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication from October 29th to 31st, 2014 at CIT Lab of The IIS University. The resource person for the workshop was Mr. Sanjay Jain, Page Designer, Rajasthan Patrika, Jaipur. The workshop helped students to learn newspaper designing as a part of their curriculum. Quark Xpress is very popular software used for designing and layouting of newspaper, knowledge in the same would help students in rendering a position in field of designing in the print industry. The workshop gave students a chance not only to interact with a professional page designer but to also be acquainted with various challenges faced in designing and how to outcome them.

In the workshop, Mr. Jain introduced students with Quark Xpress – its role, functions, use and various tools which are mostly employed in designing of a page. He discussed about some basic tools such as select tool, move tool, crop tool, resize tool, text tool etc. He talked about aesthetics of page designing, how to incorporate text and pictures, what should be the ratio, the use of colours, headlines, the size of text. He said people often take designing of pages lightly as they think that it’s not too dynamic and attractive as electronic ads or digital media, but the truth is print media is way too dynamic than one could imagine. Discussing about print media’s reach and advantages he later spoke about scope of page designing as a career choice. He said all work in newspaper is important but if it can’t be set into the page right then the newspaper can not go out. He said that the role of a page designer is an important one and so there is a humongous responsibility to do it on time. Newspaper has to go out at a fixed time and that is why page designer has to work with full responsibility, alike other staff at print media houses.

 He also told students that print media are all about space. He then discussed about how to make the optimum use of space available.  He gave detailed presentation to touch all the nuances of page designing. After the completion of his presentation, students were given a task to design front page of newspaper using QuarkXpress.

By doing what they had just learned, students were able to resolve the rising queries with Mr. Sanjay Jain. Under guidance of Mr Jain, students designed wonderful pages and Mr Jain said at the end that he was impressed by the work of students of JMC department.