Quark announced today that the agency group Kreativdienst has published the German fashion and lifestyle catalogue IMPRESSIONEN as an iPad app using QuarkXPress® 9 and App Studio^TM. The IMPRESSIONEN app is now available free of charge in the Apple Store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/impressionen/id478822934?mt=8.

IMPRESSIONEN offers readers attractive, high-quality, and exciting fashion, lifestyle, and decor products. The new iPad app not only features a sophisticated, interactive shopping experience, but also links directly to the existing IMPRESSIONEN Web store (www.impressionen.de). Customers can use the app to order goods quickly and conveniently with a single click inside the app. The ability to integrate HTML links within the app using QuarkXPress and App Studio made it possible to create a complete purchasing process without additional development costs or programming.

In order to produce the iPad version of the IMPRESSIONEN catalogue, the Kreativdienst team initially carried out test runs with Adobe Creative Suite. "However, we decided on QuarkXPress 9 with App Studio," reports Florian Rathcke from Kreativdienst, who shares responsibility with two colleagues for producing the app. "The Quark App Studio cost model is significantly clearer and easier to understand and there are only fixed costs, no monthly fees or variable costs that are impossible to calculate. Plus, the fixed costs are incurred only when we publish."

Rathcke and his colleagues come from the traditional print sector, but also have some experience in the creation of digital media. App Studio was new territory for everybody, but it didn’t take them long to get familiar with the new digital publishing. According to Rathcke, "The functionality of App Studio is easy to grasp. Even without previous experience in this specialized area, my colleagues and I found it relatively easy to understand the procedure for generating interactive elements.”

There are plans to bring additional IMPRESSIONEN catalogues to the iPad using QuarkXPress 9 and App Studio. Besides publishing the main catalogue on the iPad, work is underway to create a format that will exist exclusively as a digital publishing version.

A complete case study is available to download here: http://www.quark.com/About_Quark/Press/Success_Stories.aspx.