Quark announced today that Vanderbilt University, the private research university and medical center in Nashville, TN, chose QuarkXPress® and App Studio^TM to publish its first publication-based iPad app. House Organ, the magazine for the staff, faculty, volunteers, and students of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is now accessible on any iPad and can be downloaded at  http://itunes.apple.com/app/vumc-house-organ/id486415475?mt=8 or from the Apple app store.

With the 30th anniversary of House Organ approaching in December 2011, the editor wanted to create a special issue to commemorate the longevity of the school’s dedicated medical center magazine. A complete retrospective of thirty years of House Organ covers would be a perfect way to celebrate, but a print version would put the project over budget. Having investigated various digital publishing options, Keith Wood, a Vanderbilt senior designer, knew that by taking the House Organ to the iPad the team could showcase the covers in a new, interactive, and highly visual way.

“I had been looking into digital publishing for over a year and was creating test pieces with a variety of tools, including solutions from Adobe. I found building interactive content with various other software options was cumbersome and the pricing was way out of line,” Wood explained. “I held out for QuarkXPress and App Studio because I had a lot of previous success creating interactive presentations like Virtual Vanderbilt, a digital athletics recruiting tool. Creating the issue file for our first ever digital publication-based iPad app was really easy and I picked up on it quickly.”

As a longtime designer, Wood admits that once the creative work is complete, the experience of building the app and publishing it to the Apple app store will not be familiar to most creative professionals. “Digital publishing is a new opportunity for designers and it brings with it some uncharted territory and new terminology. We bought an Apple ID for the department and you might at first wonder, ‘What is Apple doing?’ and ‘What am I paying for?,’” said Wood. “The unfamiliarity of digital publishing is daunting for most designers but now that I’ve gone through the complete process with QuarkXPress and App Studio, it’s a piece of cake.”

The House Organ iPad app was launched in December 2011 and is published monthly by the Medical Center’s Office of News and Communications to coincide with the print issue. The Creative Services team is excited about being a leader in the use of this new technology and is now prepared to produce more publication-based apps for Medical Center and University departments.

For more information about QuarkXPress and App Studio, please visit:http://www.quark.com/Products/QuarkXPress/. Quark offers QuarkXPress 9 at a special discounted price of $199 for educators and students, and App Studio template and issue licenses are also significantly discounted. For more information please visit:http://www.quark.com/Products/QuarkXPress/Programs/Education/.