Quark announced today the QuarkXPress for Educators Program, an exclusive chance for teachers in North America to receive a complimentary copy of the newest version of QuarkXPress. The program aims to help teachers in K-12 and higher education institutions gain experience with QuarkXPress 9 in order to prepare students for the emerging need for skills in digital design and cross-media publishing, including designing apps for the iPad.

With a free license of QuarkXPress 9, educators are able to:

-- Experiment with digital design through the integration of interactive features
-- Teach students collaboration and designer-driven automation skills that will prepare them for world of digital publishing
-- Create documents for print and Web, in addition to Apple’s iPad and e-readers like the Kindle

Dana Coester, assistant professor at West Virginia University’s School of Journalism and formerly an art director with Time, Inc., works with both InDesign and QuarkXPress, but has been especially pleased with App Studio. App Studio works with QuarkXPress 9 to allows users to create content that can be published to digital devices — e-readers, smartphones, and tablets — with one tool, and without coding.

Coester said, “I choose QuarkXPress 9 for digital publishing because it offers a low threshold entry to the tablet space for independent designers, small publications, and students building portfolio work. The WoodWing integration for InDesign seems to be designed primarily for large corporate publishing and large scale multi-issue workflow. It does not invite the kind of innovative, independent, and artisan publishing that QuarkXPress 9 can enable. Quark also offers training materials for publishing to tablets that really help print designers move into interactive space in an accessible, convenient way.”

Keith Martin, senior lecturer at the London College of Communication, said, “This is a great opportunity for teachers to try out QuarkXPress 9, an established professional tool that defined the course of desktop publishing and is still going strong. It is proving very popular with our students at London College of Communication for creating digital publications. Teachers can learn the basics very quickly and help their students realize their creative ideas, producing print and digital work with only one piece of software and acquiring understanding and skills that are invaluable in the ever-changing publishing industry.”

Keith Wood, a senior designer at Vanderbilt University said, “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. 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.”

Free step-by-step tutorials from Quark come in the form of modular lessons that span from QuarkXPress basics and typography to interactive layouts and digital publishing. Each module contains a PDF guide and all the supporting sample files required to complete the module. To learn more about QuarkXPress 9 or to view online training videos, please visit:http://www.quark.com/Products/QuarkXPress/Quark_Training/#.T_NdW_VXfcw.

The QuarkXPress for Educators Program is open to K-12 and higher education educators at accredited institutions in the United States and Canada who teach classes in graphic design, digital media, print media, journalism, imaging arts, interactive media, interactive arts and development, new media, as well as other study areas that can be submitted to Quark for consideration. The program will be introduced in additional geographies in the coming weeks. To learn more and sign up, please visit: http://www.quark.com/Products/QuarkXPress/Programs/Education/Teacher_Try_It.aspx.

To check out iPad apps created by all types of designers, visit Quark’s App Showcase:
http://www.quark.com/Products/AppStudio/App_Showcase.aspx.

Education Pricing
The retail price of QuarkXPress 9 is $849 for full product or $349 for an upgrade. Students, teachers, and faculty are eligible for special education pricing of $199 for full product and upgrades and students graduating from higher education institutions are eligible for a commercial graduate pricing of $349. Quark education volume licensing for both K-12 and higher education institutions is also available which offers an over 80 percent discount off the retail cost of implementing QuarkXPress 9. Volume licensing packages also include one year of QuarkXPress maintenance.