Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.
As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.
“We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design,” Ryan Moore recalls “We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we’re suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around.”
It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they’d already been using.
The only “glitch” in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a “glitch,” and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.
It became imperative that he find a solution the day a new client brought in a QuarkXPress file from an older-version of the application. The job was a “rush,” and the creative team needed to extrapolate the content as quickly as possible in order to being working on it in Adobe InDesign.
“Rather than buy the new Quark or look for a friend to open it, we searched the Web and found [Q2id]. Thirty minutes later, we had our file converted and were on our way,” Moore recalls.
Developed by Markzware, Inc., http://www.markzware.com, Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign), is an inexpensive little Adobe plug-in with a self-explanatory name. Simply put, it enables user to open QuarkXPress files with Adobe InDesign, while preserving the elements and formatting, including page positiong, color models, fonts and styles, images, and more. Once installed, converting a file requires just a few familiar clicks: Within Adobe InDesign, users click on File, then Open, and choose teh QuarkXPress document they wish to convert.
“We purchased it either at the end of 2007 or early 2008 for a specific project [for which] we received files from the client — from another designer — that were in QuarkXPress 7,” Moore recalls. “It would have taken hours to rebuild and, instead, it took minutes to convert … It saved the day, and the budget!”
As time goes by, dealing with QuarkXPress-housed content becomes less of a concern for the team at Moore Creative. Ryan Moore estimates that a QuarkXPress file passes through the office approximately once every four months.
“It’s not something we use every day,” he notes, “but when we do need it, it’s been in an emergency rush situation, and Q2ID has saved the day … Zero problems. Exactly as advertised. And worked perfectly the first time,” Moore says of Q2ID. “that was the best part. It was so easy to use. Nothing complicated.”
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