QuarkXPress Helps Make Culinary Books Successful

QuarkXPress played an important role in producing the mock-ups and several layout designs for books on cooking and cosmetics in association with publishers, photographers and chefs.

Paris (France) design studio Artyg Arts and Types' latest book, Cote Crillon and Cote Maison (published by Flammarion) is said to illustrate the culinary creations of Jean-Francois Piege, who is the chef at the Les Ambassadeurs restaurant at the Le Crillon hotel in Paris.

Cote Crillon, Cote Maison includes photography by Grant Symon.

It was launched in October with a print run of 10,000 copies.

Artyg Arts and Types worked with Patrick Mikanowski and Grant Symon for a number of years.

Together they produced various books in which 36 French chefs presented vegetables from a gastronomic perspective and in which 40 international chefs paied tribute to the egg through a variety of sweet and savoury creations.

All of the books based around Grant Symon's images began with suggestions by Christophe Auger.

Quark said that it takes four to five months to produce the end result - a combination of text and images that bring the creations to life on the page.

Auger said: "Font management under QuarkXPress 7 is sufficiently rich to manage the entire layout process, including kerning, making it the natural creative tool to communicate the depth of flavour and colour of fanciful haute cuisine." Auger continued: "Since discovering QuarkXPress, we've not missed an update and all six of our workstations run QuarkXPress 7." To broaden its customer base, Artyg Arts and Types has tested competitive page layout packages, but as Auger admitted: "When we need to speed up production or work on large files, nothing beats the flexibility and intuition of QuarkXPress 7." And he added: "It's not just habit that has kept us using QuarkXPress for years.

QuarkXPress can easily manage large files and, with layers, enables us to work in a transparent way.

More importantly, it is enormously stable.

The fact that QuarkXPress 7 includes a number of European and foreign symbols (Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, for example) is a huge bonus for us, because we work on books that are distributed internationally." Artyg Arts and Types designs about a dozen magazines a year, two or three books and product packaging.

Auger explained: "We define the graphic style for the magazines and on the book side we've built up a close working relationship with photographer Grant Symon.

We've got to keep the reader interested for 200 pages, so we chose a layout similar to a magazine but with a book's superior quality." And Auger added: "Whatever anyone says, there's simply nothing like QuarkXPress 7 with its ease with which you can access the most frequently used menus, PDF management optimisation and creation of high resolution PDF files, its unbelievable capacity to compile lots of files, images and fonts in a single document.

QuarkXPress 7 really is a huge step forward in productivity for page design.".

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