Media Group Moves To QuarkXPress 7

Allers Forlag, a Swedish magazine publisher, is the latest media group in Scandinavia to upgrade to QuarkXPress 7.

Allers Forlag, a Swedish magazine publisher, is the latest media group in Scandinavia to upgrade to QuarkXPress 7.

The company is part of the family-owned media group, Carl Allers Etablissement , one of the Scandinavian region's leading media groups, whose core business activities include the publication of magazines, internet publications, TV and radio, mobile phone content and audio and printed books.

Allers Forlag focuses primarily on publishing consumer magazines and has 28 weekly and monthly titles in Sweden, which amounts to 1.5 million copies per week.

The company claims an 80 per cent market share and is the clear leader in the 30-plus woman's weekly segment, it is claimed.

Erik Ahlstrom, IT manager at Allers Forlag, said: "In today's highly competitive magazine market, we are constantly looking for ways to differentiate our titles from our competitors and whilst content is obviously a key component, the actual look and feel of the magazine plays an extremely important role.

It is for this reason that we are so excited about QuarkXPress 7 because we feel the new features will allow us to enhance our graphical capabilities and produce a superior product.

There is a definite buzz surrounding QuarkXPress 7 at the moment, and we feel it has the edge over InDesign." He added: "In terms of key new features in QuarkXPress 7, we feel that both Composition Zones and Job Jackets technology will have far reaching benefits and will help us increase efficiency in our workflow in the long term.

At the moment, for example, the pre-press department follow written or oral instructions from the graphics department, which is not only an inefficient process but can often lead to errors.

However, with QuarkXPress 7 the future will be very different." And Ahlstrom explained that in addition, the enhanced transparency and drop shadows capabilities are of particular interest to Allers Forlag's designers as it will give them more design tools and enable them to be more creative.

The Photoshop integration is seamless and gives the designers flexibility, he added.

Ed Ewing, Quark's sales director for Northern Europe, said: "We are seeing real momentum in the Scandinavian market in recent months with numerous influential media groups like A-Pressen and Metro International also upgrading to QuarkXPress 7.

It gives us great confidence to see a major magazine publisher like Allers leading this trend.

QuarkXPress 7 is packed with exciting new features, which are ideal in a magazine publishing environment and we are convinced that Allers will see a positive impact as a result of upgrading.".

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